Near a gray and unnamed city is the Zone, a place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers, and where the normal laws of physics are victim to frequent anomalies. A stalker guides two men into the Zone, specifically to an area in which deep-seated desires are granted.
This movie is like an onion, has multiple layers. To understand it, you have to be very careful and pacient. You have to focus on movie and not doing anything else while you watch it, because if you don't, you won't understand it.
http://cinematol.ro/pareri-filme-stalker-calauza-1979/
This really is the cinematic equivalent of "be careful for you wish for". Two characters - a teacher and a professor, seek out a "stalker" who can lead them through the maze of challenges that culminates in an heavily restricted area know as the zone. Why? Rumour has it, that when in that zone you may make wishes that will immediately come true. What is this place? Is it real, imaginary, alien, all of these - or it is all just a cerebral hallucination of a place that, like El Dorado, we imagine to be where all of our problems can go away, be solved, eradicated. It is loosely based on the Strugatsky brothers early seventies sci-fi novel "Roadside Picnic" but it's fair to say that Andrei Tarkovsky opens up the more linear aspects of their sto...
More style than content.
This was my first contact with the cinematographic work of Andrei Tarkovsky, a Soviet filmmaker who would end his career outside his native country when he fell into disgrace for allegedly spending too much money on films that were not worthy of the expense. A regrettable attitude, but typical of countries that prefer to spend money on missiles than on support for culture and education, especially after considering how dangerous and insubmissive can be a cultured population capable of thinking without anyone from a party saying what It's the right thing.
This is not, however, an ordinary Soviet film, loaded with subliminal messages, more or less direct, demonizing the rich and praising the effort and digni...
