Andrei Tarkovsky made some of the most beautiful and melancholic films that I’ve seen. I discovered him via “Solaris”: and it probably was the first art house film that I saw. Slowly paced, poetic and beautifully shot, it was intriguing and different from anything that I’d seen before. Years later I saw Nostalghia which was filled with some of the most strikingly beautiful images ever seen on film.
Finally I saw Stalker which is a story about a man who takes people into a mysterious Zone that contains a room where wishes come true. The Zone is guarded and it is dangerous to travel there and the bulk of the film consists of the journey into the Zone with Stalker who guides Writer and Professor there. But a description of the plot doesn’t really explain the film which is more visual and poetic than literal (as you can probably guess from characters known as Writer and Professor).
Stalker mixes sepia-toned scenes with scenes shot in colour all with an incredible attention to detail. It is set in a decaying world filled with people without hope, yet somehow it has a beauty. It washes over you and is haunting, slow and strangely compelling like all of Tarkovsky’s work.