the make-believe zone
We came to the Ultimate Picture Palace to see Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker through the sort of soaking wet, freezing cold night where the air is thick with damp that seems to wind its way in among your clothes, defying gravity. We found a surprisingly large number of people queueing in the rain. Students and film buffs, one guy just behind me actually smoking a clove cigarette. ("Is that a clove?" I squeaked at him, "I thought you couldn't get them in this country." But no, at the tobacconist's on the High Street, apparently.) When we'd all piled into the little cinema, the space between each seat and the seat in front filled with bulky coats and umbrellas and scarves, the air was damp as it evaporated off us and our wet layers, and mingling with the UPP's usual rich antique mustiness was a distinct smell of wet dog as we settled down to watch a big, slow, thoughtful film which itself was full of rain and mud. Soggy grass and weeds, water rushing through channels and chuckling through drains and lying in puddles on broken tiles, with syringes and religious icons lying just beneath the surface. Afterwards it was still raining, and walking with wet feet through the orange-black night with real drains chuckling and everything shiny with damp, it was as though the film hadn't ended. "That did something funny to my brain," Dan said.
I don't usually write film reviews, but the more I think about this one the more I want to say. It's been a long time since I saw a film that both took work and repaid it. Stalker is like being on the slow train through Siberia. At first your brain rebels against the long slow panning shots, and the way the camera lingers on people's faces, and the way silence stretches out after someone's said something particularly portentous, in much the way mine did when confronted with hundreds of miles of the same fields, the same birch trees and tiny villages. Then… you sink into it. You slow down to the pace of the long takes. Your thoughts swoop slowly along like telephone wires by the railway track. At some point you realise you've been utterly absorbed for you don't know how long and no longer care that your bum is numb.
So there's a guy, known only as the Stalker, whose job it is to guide people through the mysterious, forbidden, alien-influenced place called the Zone to a room which supposedly can grant the heart's desire. In this film he leaves his mutant daughter (who was born that way because he spends so much time in the Zone) and his wife who's convinced that this time he won't return, to guide two men called the Writer and the Professor, who each do a great deal of philosophising along the way about art and science and faith and hope and other such art-movie topics of conversation. There's a dog as well, who symbolises… I don't know quite what. Possibly innocence. Dan wanted to see this film because he'd read the book it was based on, a SF novel called Roadside Picnic. In the book the Zone is actually full of alien artifacts, gravitational anomalies and stuff like that. In the film the Zone is just… some fields, full of lush vegetation growing over rusting, abandoned industry. There are no special effects whatsoever. Coming to it with preconceptions based on the book, Dan was disappointed at this. I was sure at one point he was praying for some ninjas to show up and break the tedium. And yet… somehow it all worked, and it won me over. The Zone is a field, but it's a field ruled by dream logic, trip logic, and crossing it is a dangerous, daring mission for which - the Stalker says - you need to become like a little child, because the Zone gives you what you expect. If you try to fight it it will meet you with violence. In the Zone you can't retrace your steps because the traps change all the time. You can't go out the way you came in. We have no evidence of this but what the Stalker says. It's just a field. But somehow I believed him. The Stalker's words about the place, his account of how it worked, shaped how I saw it more than the mundane details of how it actually looked. Mind you, the way it's filmed is deeply unsettling too. A hesitant walk down a rusty, dripping tunnel is flipping terrifying even before the Stalker tells us it's known as 'the meat-grinder' and says his friend's brother perished in it. It's clear that David Lynch watched this and took notes.
The Stalker feels like a loser in every other area of his life. But he's good at being a guide to the Zone. He knows its ways. He lies down and rolls in its lush grass saying he's come home. He needs there to be a place with rules like this, a place where a sort of magic works. And the film suggests that many people do - need there to be a corner of the world that is magic, that moulds itself to thought, that operates by the rules of Let's Pretend games and holds the key to heart's desire, even if we never avail of it. The Writer declares (in his rather pompous, wrong-headed way) that maths has bled all the wonder out of the world. But the Zone is different. So long as it exists people can have hope. Fair enough, you think, then the film turns round and shows you that hope and leaps of faith and works of magic can happen in the real world too.
All this swam slowly up to the surface of my mind over the course of nearly three hours watching grass move and drops fall in water and that mysterious dog come and go. At first I wanted the gravitational anomalies and obvious weirdshit, then I started to think that any actual special effects, any concretising of the mystery, funnelling all the possibilities down to one specific weird thing, would spoil it. I preferred the pervasive sense of undefined magic and menace. We didn't have special effects when we turned the tree-lined field behind the school into a city of 'camps' at war with each other, or the fantastic idea-space country from The Neverending Story (whose laws, incidentally, were much like those of the Zone), or space, or Willy Wonka's factory or Monchichi Land; a different set of rules every day or every week, different software running on the hardware of the field depending on what stories were possessing me and the friends I pretended with. It was in our heads that every tree and tussock of grass had mythic significance, and that was how this film felt. Admittedly, some of the Writer and the Professor's conversations were a bit emptily pretentious and some were the kind of simplistic philosophy you might spout at the pub in your first year of university, but I found myself under a very powerful spell all the same.
I want to read the book now. You could have a lot of fun with the idea of a mysterious alien Zone where the laws of physics are visibly warped and mysterious gadgets are everywhere. Slap-bang, omg-it's-a-trap, shimmery-CGI-forcefield, pirates-and-ninjas fun. You could make a very different movie based on the book, perhaps with George Clooney in, and maybe it would be more entertaining in the traditional way. I doubt it'd have had me still mulling it over days later, though.
More Clever Movies plzthx.
I don't usually write film reviews, but the more I think about this one the more I want to say. It's been a long time since I saw a film that both took work and repaid it. Stalker is like being on the slow train through Siberia. At first your brain rebels against the long slow panning shots, and the way the camera lingers on people's faces, and the way silence stretches out after someone's said something particularly portentous, in much the way mine did when confronted with hundreds of miles of the same fields, the same birch trees and tiny villages. Then… you sink into it. You slow down to the pace of the long takes. Your thoughts swoop slowly along like telephone wires by the railway track. At some point you realise you've been utterly absorbed for you don't know how long and no longer care that your bum is numb.
So there's a guy, known only as the Stalker, whose job it is to guide people through the mysterious, forbidden, alien-influenced place called the Zone to a room which supposedly can grant the heart's desire. In this film he leaves his mutant daughter (who was born that way because he spends so much time in the Zone) and his wife who's convinced that this time he won't return, to guide two men called the Writer and the Professor, who each do a great deal of philosophising along the way about art and science and faith and hope and other such art-movie topics of conversation. There's a dog as well, who symbolises… I don't know quite what. Possibly innocence. Dan wanted to see this film because he'd read the book it was based on, a SF novel called Roadside Picnic. In the book the Zone is actually full of alien artifacts, gravitational anomalies and stuff like that. In the film the Zone is just… some fields, full of lush vegetation growing over rusting, abandoned industry. There are no special effects whatsoever. Coming to it with preconceptions based on the book, Dan was disappointed at this. I was sure at one point he was praying for some ninjas to show up and break the tedium. And yet… somehow it all worked, and it won me over. The Zone is a field, but it's a field ruled by dream logic, trip logic, and crossing it is a dangerous, daring mission for which - the Stalker says - you need to become like a little child, because the Zone gives you what you expect. If you try to fight it it will meet you with violence. In the Zone you can't retrace your steps because the traps change all the time. You can't go out the way you came in. We have no evidence of this but what the Stalker says. It's just a field. But somehow I believed him. The Stalker's words about the place, his account of how it worked, shaped how I saw it more than the mundane details of how it actually looked. Mind you, the way it's filmed is deeply unsettling too. A hesitant walk down a rusty, dripping tunnel is flipping terrifying even before the Stalker tells us it's known as 'the meat-grinder' and says his friend's brother perished in it. It's clear that David Lynch watched this and took notes.
The Stalker feels like a loser in every other area of his life. But he's good at being a guide to the Zone. He knows its ways. He lies down and rolls in its lush grass saying he's come home. He needs there to be a place with rules like this, a place where a sort of magic works. And the film suggests that many people do - need there to be a corner of the world that is magic, that moulds itself to thought, that operates by the rules of Let's Pretend games and holds the key to heart's desire, even if we never avail of it. The Writer declares (in his rather pompous, wrong-headed way) that maths has bled all the wonder out of the world. But the Zone is different. So long as it exists people can have hope. Fair enough, you think, then the film turns round and shows you that hope and leaps of faith and works of magic can happen in the real world too.
All this swam slowly up to the surface of my mind over the course of nearly three hours watching grass move and drops fall in water and that mysterious dog come and go. At first I wanted the gravitational anomalies and obvious weirdshit, then I started to think that any actual special effects, any concretising of the mystery, funnelling all the possibilities down to one specific weird thing, would spoil it. I preferred the pervasive sense of undefined magic and menace. We didn't have special effects when we turned the tree-lined field behind the school into a city of 'camps' at war with each other, or the fantastic idea-space country from The Neverending Story (whose laws, incidentally, were much like those of the Zone), or space, or Willy Wonka's factory or Monchichi Land; a different set of rules every day or every week, different software running on the hardware of the field depending on what stories were possessing me and the friends I pretended with. It was in our heads that every tree and tussock of grass had mythic significance, and that was how this film felt. Admittedly, some of the Writer and the Professor's conversations were a bit emptily pretentious and some were the kind of simplistic philosophy you might spout at the pub in your first year of university, but I found myself under a very powerful spell all the same.
I want to read the book now. You could have a lot of fun with the idea of a mysterious alien Zone where the laws of physics are visibly warped and mysterious gadgets are everywhere. Slap-bang, omg-it's-a-trap, shimmery-CGI-forcefield, pirates-and-ninjas fun. You could make a very different movie based on the book, perhaps with George Clooney in, and maybe it would be more entertaining in the traditional way. I doubt it'd have had me still mulling it over days later, though.
More Clever Movies plzthx.