Nonfiction review: Zona

In the late 1970s, the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made a film that many cinephiles find mesmerizing. (Among its fans is the actress Cate Blanchett, who declared, "I feel like every single frame of that film has been burned into my retina.")

Try explaining "Stalker" after a single viewing, though, and it threatens to disappear altogether under a cloud of unknowing.

If any film demands book-length explication from a writer of Geoff Dyer's caliber, it's surely "Stalker." It is by turns strange, fascinating and impenetrable.

On the surface, the plot is simple. Two men — known to viewers only as Writer and Professor — want to visit a mysterious, wish-granting Room that lies hidden deep in a forbidden Zone. (Trust me. It's the sort of place that merits capital letters.) They hire a guide, the eponymous Stalker, to take them there. The men elude armed patrols and undergo hardships, and — spoiler alert — they eventually reach the Room.

But what, precisely, happens in the Room? And why are the men so interested in visiting it? Do secret, fervently held wishes drive them or is it mere curiosity (or something more dangerous)? For that matter, why must they advance through the Zone's striking landscape by following the weighted rags Stalker throws ahead of them?

Confused cinephiles, rejoice. With its scene-by-scene summary, "Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room" feels a little as if Dyer is sitting beside you in the theater, patting your hand comfortingly.

He doesn't solve all of the film's mysteries (not even Tarkovsky could, as he demonstrated in various interviews). But like all good guides (Virgil, anyone?), Dyer suggests that the task is doable if we simply approach it in a levelheaded, perhaps even whimsical way.

Indeed, Dyer is, as the book amply demonstrates, the perfect counterpart to Tarkovsky. Where the film director is stubbornly slow and obscure, Dyer is a fleet and amusing raconteur with a knack for amusing digressions.

What, for example, would Dyer wish for if he found himself in the Room? Aside from the obligatory naughty wishes, he tells us that he might request the return of a lost Freitag bag to which he was especially attached.

And — while he's on the subject of wishful thinking — why can't "the locations of where you lost your most beloved ten or twenty possessions" be revealed to you at the end of your life, like "a film that showed your younger self walking away from the table at the festival in Adelaide, slightly drunk, while the Freitag bag, discreetly stylish in grey, sat there neglected, unnoticed and mute, incapable of calling out 'Vergissmeinnicht '"?

"'So that's what happened' you would say to yourself, shaking your head in astonishment, at the simple but profound mystery of loss, on the brink of the most profound and mysterious loss of all, that of your life," he writes.

OK, so it's funny in a sardonic way.

In the best of all possible worlds — that is, in the Room on a good day — budding Tarkovskyites might understandably wish they could buy a copy of Dyer's "Zona" bundled with an exquisitely restored version of "Stalker" from the Criterion Collection, the film pantheon's boutique of record.

Even better: Maybe an audiobook version of "Zona" could be synced up as a commentary track on the Criterion DVD. Heck, while we're at it, it would be nice if the Room threw in an edition of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic," the source novel for "Stalker."

Sadly, we don't live near the Zone, and "Stalker" isn't a part of Criterion's extensive collection.

My advice: Buy "Zona," track down a copy of Kino International's admittedly flawed DVD release of "Stalker" and Google the Strugatskys' novel (it's free online).

Your retinas will never be the same.