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  After Stalker leaves, his wife has one of those sexualized fits (nipples prominently erect) of which Tarkovsky seems to have been fond, writhing away on the hard floor in a climax of abandonment.5

  He, on the other hand, like many men before and since, is on his way to the pub, making his way through railway sidings, beautifully desolate and puddly, in the postindustrial fog.6

  As the man makes his way across the tracks, a voiceover says everything’s ‘hopelessly boring’—a remark that makes one wonder how quickly a film can become boring. Which film holds the record in that particular regard? And wouldn’t that film automatically qualify as exciting and fast-moving if it had been able to enfold the viewer so rapidly in the itchy blanket of tedium? (Or perhaps one of the novelties of our era is the possibility of instant boredom—like instant coffee—as opposed to a feeling that has to unfold gradually, suffocatingly, over time.) The overheard voice generates some very basic confusion: whose words are they? Presumably they are the vocalized thoughts of the person—Stalker—on-screen, tramping across the railroad tracks in the foggy fog, hands in pockets, looking pretty down in the mouth.

  Especially when he sees—and it is revealed—that the person doing the talking, having the overheard thoughts, is another man, with a woman in a cute little fur cape. Uh-oh! The talker is still going on about how insufferably boring everything is. She asks him about the Bermuda Triangle. He goes on some more about how boring everything is, reckons that maybe even the Zone is boring, that it might have been more interesting to have lived in the Middle Ages. What does he mean by this? Is he saying, effectively, that he’d rather have been in Andrei Rublev than Stalker? Which wouldn’t make sense, because he’s Tarkovsky’s favourite actor, Anatoli Solonitsyn—and thirteen years earlier he was Andrei Rublev in Andrei Rublev! She, on the other hand, looks like a refugee from the Antonioni set. Not only is she wearing the fur number and a long dress, they’re standing by a convertible—with the soft roof up—and she’s drinking out of a long clear glass, as if they’ve just emerged from the place where an orgy seems in the offing but never quite happens in Red Desert. They are at a port of some kind (ditto Red Desert). There’s a ship in the background, and rigging, derricks.

  It is obvious, from the moment he enters the frame, that Stalker takes a dim view of this pair, even though the man says that the woman—whose name he can’t recall— has agreed to come to the Zone too, though, frankly, she does not seem to be dressed for any kind of expedition. She’s excited to meet an actual Stalker—evidently there’s quite an aura attached to this shadowy outlaw caste—but he has just one word for her: Go. It’s a man’s world, the Zone. She gets in the car and, pausing only to call Solonitsyn a cretin (or maybe she’s telling him that Stalker is a cretin), drives off—with his hat on the roof. It’s the first of several humorous moments in the film.7

  Stalker was not happy about the way this man brought along a woman and he’s not happy about the way that the man has been drinking. Yes, okay, I’ve been drinking, the man admits, but I’m not drunk. Half the population has a drink, the other half is drunk, he says. Is this an accurate reflection of drinking habits in the USSR? Was it one of the things Tarkovsky came to miss about the slimy pond of his homeland?8 A couple of times in his diaries, Tarkovsky talks about getting drunk and ‘go[ing] on the booze’, but Stalker takes a dim view of drinking. At this stage, in fact, apart from the Zone, there’s nothing of which he does not take a dim view. The man takes a swig from a bottle; in the other hand he clutches a plastic bag, like a teenager with his stash of glue.

  STALKER WALKS UP the steps into a bar, the bar we saw earlier. Relatively speaking, customers are pouring in. Happy Hour in a place that looks like people need it. The windows, like the barman’s jacket, could do with a good clean. They afford only the dimmest view of the world outside. Stalker is followed by the man, who treats us to another bit of slapstick slipping convincingly on the steps. It’s not just customers—the gags are coming thick and fast now, it’s practically Buster Keaton round here, Buster Keaton in his long-lost, social-realist classic Happy Hour.

  THE TALL MAN, the man we saw in the precredit sequence, is still there, drinking coffee, and the barman is still smoking. Not for the last time we are back where we started. We don’t need a sign to tell us this is the Last Chance Saloon. Chance of getting a decent cappuccino? Zero. Hundred-percent-proof vodka? Now you’re talking. Stalker tells the tall fellow, Go ahead, have a drink— but when the other guy produces his bottle (he’s brought it with him into the bar, coals-to-Newcastle style) Stalker tells him to take it away. Okay, says the man, in the timehonoured sophistry of the alcoholic, we’ll drink beer instead. The barman pours him a beer. Stalker glances at his watch, the watch he’s stolen from his wife, a gesture of impatience and anxiety that the audience may or may not share. All the time the barman is pouring his drink the man is holding the glass, eager to get on the outside of what’s inside it. The moment the barman has stopped pouring he downs it in one—attaboy!—and by the time the barman has finished filling two other glasses, he’s ready for a refill. At the heart of the Zone is the Room, a place where—we will learn later—your deepest wish will come true, but one gets the impression that this room is his Room, that his deepest wish is being catered for right here, chain-swilling beer.9 He brings the refill and two other glasses over to Stalker and the tall man. He’s about to introduce himself, but Stalker (played by Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) tells him his name is Writer and the tall guy’s name is Professor (Nikolai Grinko). Ah, hints of the heist here: Mr. Pink, Mr. White and all that: generic code names in the style of Reservoir Dogs. Has Stalker been lured back into the Zone for one last job?

  Every time I see people drinking in films I am immediately seized with a desire to have a drink myself. Certain countries—that is, the films produced by certain countries—tend to make particular drinks look especially alluring. French films, predictably, make one crave red wine, but whites with a château on the label look pretty good too. Whiskey looks good in westerns. (‘Men swaggering into saloons. Thirsty from cattle drives.’) Beer looks good anywhere. And not just in films. In most countries of the world, even the shittiest ones, you can generally get your hands on a beer that is, as they say, drinkable. Speaking of beer, we are interested, obviously, to see if Stalker is going to get one down him. Who knows, perhaps he’ll even get his round in? As it turns out, only Writer drinks anything at all. Professor sits with his coffee and Stalker just looks anxious. Writer is the one doing the drinking—maybe he should have been called Drinker—and he is also the one doing most of the talking. When Professor asks him what he writes he says one should write about ‘absolutely nothing.’ So, a Flaubertian in his way. In a letter of 1852 Flaubert announced his desire to write ‘a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.’ In this direction, Flaubert believed, lay ‘the future of Art’: ‘There is no longer any orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its creator.’ Compared to content-driven Hollywood cinema this sounds like a reasonable prediction of what Tarkovsky would achieve in Mirror (the film he made before Stalker): not a film about nothing, obviously (it could equally claim to be a film about everything), but one held uniquely together by the director’s style—‘the will of its creator’—rather than by the mechanical demands of narrative or ‘the burden of tradition.’ Flaubert concludes this interlude of speculation with an observation that could have come straight from Tarkovsky’s diaries: ‘From the standpoint of pure Art one might establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject—style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.’

  Anyway, they’re standing round the table in the bar, having a good old chat and a drink, though really Writer is the one doing
most of the chatting and all of the drinking—and, in the time-honoured tradition of the drunkard, he’s repeating himself. He’s going on about triangles again, just as he was with the woman outside, before Stalker sent her packing. Triangles this, triangles that. He wonders why Professor is going to the Zone but then launches into his own explanation of why he’s going there, what he’s looking for. Inspiration, it turns out. He’s washed up. Finished. Maybe by going to the Zone he’ll be rejuvenated. Man, I know how he feels. I could do with a piece of that action myself. I mean, do you think I would be spending my time summarizing the action of a film almost devoid of action—not frame by frame, perhaps, but certainly take by take—if I was capable of writing anything else? In my way I am going to the Room—following these three to the Room—to save myself.10

  All the time this conversation is going on, the camera is moving in, getting tighter, but so imperceptibly you can’t tell it’s happening until it’s happened, until we are practically leaning on the table with them. Often, in Tarkovsky, when we think something is still it’s not; at the very least, the frame is contracting or expanding slightly, almost as if the film were breathing.

  We hear the hooting of a train, can hear that lonesome whistle blow. So, this grim-looking bar does have several things going for it—if by ‘several’ we mean ‘one’, namely proximity to the railway station. The hooting grows louder. Do you hear it? Our train? says Stalker, checking his—i.e., his wife’s—watch.11 They get ready to leave the bar. No one says, ‘Drink up!’ but that’s pretty much the idea. The camera continues to move in on Stalker, who says to Luger, the lugubrious barman—a type so strong and silent he could have found work as an actor back in the 1920s, before the introduction of sound—that if he doesn’t make it back, to ‘call’ on his wife. And what? Deliver a message of condolence? Sit there smoking a cigarette, silently? See if there’s any chance of her laundering his jacket? After this speech Stalker stares right at the camera. Writer is about to leave the bar, we see the back of his head and then he turns and stares straight at the camera so that, momentarily, in accord with the shot-reverse-shot convention, Stalker and Writer have both stared straight at each other. But it also seems that they are staring straight at us. This is in direct contravention of Roland Barthes’s edict in his essay ‘Right in the Eyes’, that, while it is permissible for the subject to stare into the lens—at the spectator—in a still photograph, ‘it is forbidden for an actor to look at the camera’ in a movie. So convinced was Barthes of his own rule that he was ‘not far from considering this ban as the cinema’s distinctive feature…If a single gaze from the screen came to rest on me, the whole film would be lost.’ In this case, the effect is to implicate us in the reciprocity of their gaze. We are going along for the ride too. We are one of them.

  THEY—WE—HEAD OUTSIDE. Stalker is carrying some kind of carry-out and he tramps through a puddle. This is no accident. Whatever else he may be, Stalker is a man with a MacArthur-like indifference to getting his feet wet. They clamber into a waiting jeep. The air is filled, now, with the constant blowing of the lonesome whistle. It is raining and the headlights of the jeep are pure white in the gloom and damp. Stalker is driving. Although we cannot see the rain falling through the air—it is drizzling, not pouring—we can see puddles, rain sprinkling the puddles and the headlights reflected in the puddles, and the jeep driving through the drizzled headlights of the puddles, driving through shrubbery, through damp and gloomy alleyways in which lingering mist still lingers. The jeep is perfectly chosen. No other vehicle could serve as well at this juncture. A Mini Cooper would have established a connection with The Italian Job (as Nostalghia should perhaps have been called) and the sleek convertible we saw at the beginning would have lent a touch of class and glamour, but the jeep, for all its discomfort, harks back to the Long Range Desert Group, to every movie ever made about the Second World War. It is the most swaggering of vehicles, designed for gung-ho generals (Patton) and fearless war photographers (Capa) and, as such, is immune to traffic regulations and the slow congestion of supply convoys. It is synonymous with pure, rugged and manly adventure. They are overcoated commandos, these three (one of them will actually turn out to be an explosives expert), volunteers on a daring raid behind enemy lines, with more than a hint ofLast of the Summer Wine thrown in.

  AS THE JEEP turns a corner they hear the sound of a revving motorbike and hit the deck, the damp deck. On release Stalker was billed as a sort of sci-fi film and this is the beginning of the most sci-fi-y sequence in the movie, even if, overall, Tarkovsky was pleased with the way that he’d been able to get rid of most of the elements that made it look like sci-fi, in a way that he had not been able to do with Solaris, which remained within the confines of genre (difficult to avoid with a movie set in the future, on a space station) and was, for this reason, Tarkovsky’s least favourite among his films.12

  The motorcyclist is a guard, patrolling a perimeter or a premise. He’s wearing leathers and a white helmet and looks like a guard from Metropolis or 1984. Inevitably, now that certain seminal dates in the calendar of sci-fi projection—1984, 2001—have come and gone, faded into history, large parts of the genre have acquired an antiquarian quality, have become a future-oriented subset of costume drama. One possible interpretation of this sequence, then, is that Stalker and his mates are trying to escape from the clutches of history itself, from the ruinous vision of the future announced by Marx, which, a little more than a decade after the film was made, would finally declare itself obsolete and bankrupt.

  There follows a cat-and-mouse car chase through what looks like an incomplete Artangel project in an abandoned warehouse from back in the days when I first saw Stalker, when there were abandoned warehouses all over London. I say car chase but there’s only one car—a car that is actually a jeep—and it’s a bit confusing in terms of where exactly Stalker is going or trying to reach. In other words it’s a car chase in classic mode in that it exists not in order to achieve anything in particular but in order to bring into existence and be part of the vehicular ritual called a car chase. While the jeep nips in and out of all this postindustrial dejection the gates are opened for the freight train whose lonesome whistle we have heard blowing. Like Luger the barman, the guy who opens the gate is smoking a cigarette. He might be Stalker’s inside man, a believer in the Zone who, for some kind of cut, has agreed to help them get through. Once the gates are open and the jeep has slithered through he runs off, to alert the authorities, presumably, so that, along with everything else, Stalker has the possibility of a double-cross to bear. We really could be in a heist movie—a sci-fi heist movie.

  The big ole freight train hoves into view, bearing components of an electricity generator or something of that ilk, something huge, state-funded and probably harmful to the environment. The heavy train rumbles to the heavily guarded border crossing. The screen creaks under the weight of everything that is being projected onto it, especially since what is being projected is like a distant memory of the dawn of cinema, of the Lumière brothers and their train arriving at the station in 1895. Bright lights. The guards—dressed like the one we saw earlier on the motorbike—check to see that there aren’t stowaways hidden on or under the train. Stalker has always invited allegorical readings, and since the film has something of the quality of a prophecy, these readings are not confined to events that had occurred by the time the film was made. As the guards scan the train for stowaways, viewers of a particular political bent might be tempted to regard this train as a precursor of the Eurostar, poised to enter the Channel Tunnel, having passed close to Sangatte refugee camp, with the Zone an idealized image of the UK and its generous welfare system: a land of milk and honey with many opportunities for those willing to live in Peterborough and dig vegetables for six quid an hour. According to this reading Stalker is himself an asylum seeker—except he’s seeking asylum from the world. The irony, as Chris Marker points out in One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, his homage to Tarkovsky, is that
asylum and freedom lie behind the barbed wire, in the Zone. In a way this is also true of Tarkovsky himself, for while he often felt frustrated by the control exercised by the state over his and others’ artistic freedom, in the West a subtler kind of censorship and tyranny—that of the market—would have made it extremely unlikely that he could ever have obtained permission (raised the funds) to make Mirror or Stalker. (How we loved making this point back in the 1980s!)

  There’s a brief pause as Stalker waits for the right moment to make their bid for barbed-wire freedom. Writer takes advantage of this lull to get all maudlin. He doesn’t really care about inspiration, and doesn’t know what he wants or if he really wants what he wants or doesn’t want what he really wants, and he doesn’t even care if the other two are listening—and who could blame them if they’re not?