Andrei Tarkovsky’s STALKER takes place in the fantastical land known as the Zone
STALKER (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Wednesday, December 18, 4:30 & 8:00, and Thursday, December 19, 4:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
Set in a seemingly postapocalyptic world that is never explained, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is an existential work of immense beauty, a deeply philosophical, continually frustrating, and endlessly rewarding journey into nothing less than the heart and soul of the world. Alexander Kaidanovsky stars as Stalker, a careful, precise man who has been hired to lead Writer and Professor (Tarkovsky regulars Anatoli Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko, respectively) into the forbidden Zone, a place of mystery that houses a room where it is said that people can achieve their most inner desires. While Stalker’s home and the bar where the men meet are dark, gray, and foreboding, the Zone is filled with lush green fields, trees, and aromatic flowers — as well as abandoned vehicles, strange passageways, and inexplicable sounds. The Zone — which heavily influenced J. J. Abrams’s creation of the island on Lost — has a life all its own as past, present, and future merge in an expansive land where every forward movement is fraught with danger but there is no turning back. An obsessive tyrant of a filmmaker, Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris) imbues every shot with a supreme majesty, taking viewers on an unusual and unforgettable cinematic adventure. (For our 2012 twi-ny talk with Geoff Dyer, the author of Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, which offers quite a unique take on Stalker, go here.)
Although the screwball romantic comedies are perhaps best loved for their madcap antics and fast-paced dialogue, there was also a fascinating underlying motif to many of them — as America came out of the Great Depression and WWII beckoned, the films tackled the theme of the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. George Cukor’s 1938 classic, Holiday, however, looks at the world from a slightly different perspective, pitting the rich vs. the super-rich. Based on the Broadway play by Philip Barry, which was turned into a 1930 film featuring Ann Harding, Mary Astor, Edward Everett Horton, Hedda Hopper, Robert Ames, and William Holden, Cukor’s version stars Cary Grant as Johnny Case, a self-made humble financial wizard who dreams of making just enough money to be able to afford to leave the business and go find himself. Following a whirlwind ten-day courtship with Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) while on vacation in Lake Placid, Johnny is shocked to find out that his fiancée is a member of the Seton clan, one of the richest families in America. Julia’s father, Edward (Henry Kolker), is not about to let his beloved daughter marry just anyone, so he puts Johnny through the ringer. Meanwhile, Johnny bonds with Julia’s sister, the black sheep Linda (Katharine Hepburn, who was the understudy for Linda on Broadway), who is desperate to live her own life but seems trapped in a fantasy, receiving only marginal support from their brother, Ned (Lew Ayres), who is never without a drink and a cynical word about the family, washing away his failure in cocktail after cocktail. “Walk, don’t run, to the nearest exit,” he advises Johnny. Honest, dependable, and a surprisingly good gymnast, Johnny finds solace from the crazy Setons in his longtime friends, Nick (Horton, reprising his role from the earlier film) and Susan (Jean Dixon), simpler folk with a fine sense of humor and little time for high society. As midnight on New Year’s Eve approaches, the main characters’ lives come together and fall apart in hysterical yet serious ways. Holiday is not your average screwball comedy, instead seeking to take on more personal, psychologically intimate issues and succeeding wildly, continually defying expectations and turning clichés inside out. Grant is as cool as ever, but he adds a seldom-seen vulnerability that adds to his charm. Holiday is screening December 18 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “The Discreet Charm of George Cukor,” which runs through January 7 and consists of all fifty of the Lower East Side native’s films, from Keeper of the Flame and Heller in Pink Tights to Our Betters and Tarnished Lady as well as such unforgettable classics as Sylvia Scarlett, Pat and Mike, It Should Happen to You, Camille, Gaslight, and many others.
“I left all my troubles in Poland, all the duties that occupied my days,” Malgosia says at the beginning of 1998’s The Siberian Lesson. “I really wanted to leave them all behind. I wanted a break.” As it turns out, spending a year in Usolye-Sibirskoye does not end up being much of a break for Malgosia, who arrives in a town out of time, looking more like 1956 than 1996. Malgosia has traveled to Siberia to teach her native language to the descendants of Polish exiles who fled the country during tsarist rule, men, women, and children who know little of their homeland; she is joined by her boyfriend, recent Polish Film Academy graduate Wojciech Staroń, who is documenting it all with his 16mm camera. Malgosia, who narrates the film in a dry monotone, immediately discovers that life is extremely difficult for this tight-knit community; the teachers are on strike, and poverty is rampant, the food of survival the potato, which she is told everyone must grow for themselves in order to make it through the hard winter. She meets some rather unique characters during her stay, including Tatar gym owner Zinat, Father Ignacy, and a night watchman named Walery who has dedicated his life to translating the Bible from Polish into Russian. Meanwhile, students of all ages come to her classes, seeking something they can’t otherwise find in their daily existence. Malgosia is also searching for something in her own life, and she finds it in her growing love for Wojciech, who adds beautifully poetic shots of the vast Siberian landscape to accompany Agata Steczkowska’s nearly elegiac piano score.
