The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and in particular his 1979 classic Stalker, have a reputation for being among the most difficult in cinema. Difficult, not just in the sense of intellectually demanding, but difficult as in hard to sit through, long and slow-moving and potentially very boring. Perhaps only the work of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr is viewed (or not, in most cases) with greater trepidation. Cinema buffs wear their familiarity with films such as Stalker and Tarr's seven-hour Sátántangó like a badge of honour and speak of them in reverential tones. Most other people regard them like non-mountaineers regard Everest: "I'm sure it's a great mountain, but damned if I'm climbing it."
In his new book, Geoff Dyer sets out to address this problem by articulating what he loves so much about Stalker in terms that won't alienate the casual viewer. Zona is an intriguing proposition: Dyer writes about the film in something approaching real time, describing each scene as it happens – almost like a DVD commentary – and pausing at regular intervals to reflect on the making of Stalker, on other films and other works of art, on being Geoff Dyer, and on being Geoff Dyer writing this book about Stalker. Despite operating on many layers, it's not a long book. A fast reader could polish it off in less time than it would take to watch the film itself (163 minutes).
Dyer first saw Stalker in his 20s and, though "slightly bored and unmoved" by it on that first viewing, he has returned to the film obsessively ever since. It may be a great monument looming formidably over 20th-century cinema, but to Dyer it is also a compelling human story that has proved inexhaustibly relevant to his own life and has informed (sometimes in a spookily prophetic way) how we view the world around us.
Tarkovsky's film tells the story of three men breaking into a mysterious sealed-off Zone in an unnamed country (presumably the USSR) and journeying to the even-more-mysterious Room at its heart – a place where, it is said, one's innermost wishes will be granted. Stalker is the name of the guide who leads the group.
It's billed as science-fiction, but if you watched the film with the sound off you'd think it was just three guys wandering around a debris-ridden area of countryside, grumbling at one another. And that may actually be the case: we're never sure if the Zone really does have magical powers, or whether Stalker's tales are merely the kind of superstitions that grow up around areas fenced off by the government. This uncertainty opens up a space for the Russian director to explore some of his favourite themes: the hopelessness of life; the generative power of belief; the plight of the visionary misunderstood by all.
In many ways, Dyer is the perfect man for the job of unpicking the complex mysteries of Tarkovsky's Zone. He has a rare talent for writing about high-minded concerns with disarming simplicity, and he is unafraid to mix in a bit of low culture so that on one page he'll be reflecting on Top Gear or regretting that he's never had a threesome, while on the next he's going on in the same breezy fashion about Brueghel or William James. What makes him a pleasure to read, particularly here in the inner sanctum of high cinema, is that he isn't oppressed by the need to be reverential. On the contrary, he'll crack as many bad jokes as he can about Stalker's nagging wife, or the granting of innermost wishes, en route to the transcendent truth. As the Camus quote at the front of the book says: "The best way of talking about what you love is to speak of it lightly."
By treating the characters in Stalker as tragicomic everymen, rather than figures in a great text, Dyer brings out the humour and humanity in Tarkovsky's work. It would be a mistake, though, to suppose that he is doing this – beating an accessible path into the Zone – for our benefit alone. He tells us: "There are writers for whom commentary is absolutely central to their own creative project, who insist that at some level commentary can turn out to be every bit as original as the primary work of the novelist." This is a reasonable definition of what Dyer has been doing for most of his career – in his radically digressive study of DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, for instance – and it's what he pulls off again with considerable flair here.
This, in other words, is much more than a useful guide to a classic film. It is also, in small doses, a memoir, a rumination on art and a philosophy of how to live well. Moreover, it is a running commentary on itself, and as such it poses a problem for the reviewer. Dyer is forever pre-empting criticism by flagging up the potential shortcomings of his project: wouldn't he have been better off writing a book about tennis? Now and then, he draws attention to the patchiness of his own research: he only "skimmed" the Stanislaw Lem novel that Tarkovsky's Solaris is based on and decided to avoid his final film The Sacrifice; an explanation he gives about a patricide in a recent film indebted to Tarkovsky is, he confesses, "one part Harold Bloom and one part ill-digested psychoanalysis".
This, of course, is part of the raffish, easy-going charm of his writing and a source of its comic effect. No other writer cops out quite as elegantly as Geoff Dyer. However, there are passages in the book – especially towards the end when he seems to tire of summarising the onscreen action – that feel merely dashed-off, rather than strategically lazy. The segues begin to feel forced and jokes fall flat. A dog laps at milk "like there's no tomorrow", offending against Dyer's earlier observation that the Zone is a sanctuary against cliche. It was an inspired decision to write a book about one of cinema's most austere works in a relaxed, throwaway style, but that's no justification for slapdash writing.
That said, I'm glad he undertook the journey. Even if you have zero desire to experience Tarkovsky's film first-hand, it's worth keeping company with Dyer for the tangents it sends him off on: an explanation of why the horror film Antichrist, which Lars von Trier dedicated to Tarkovsky, is "nonsense"; or the funny and poignant footnote about how Natascha McElhone in the remake of Solaris looked uncannily, at the time of its release, like Dyer's wife.
But if you've never seen Stalker, I'd urge you to watch it for the final scene alone. I agree with Dyer that it brings us to "a realm of loveliness unmatched anywhere else in cinema". It casts a miraculous light back across the rest of the film and makes the effort of scaling this great rock of cinematic art utterly worthwhile.
