Page - 52 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

begins an emotional soliloquy about the state of her husband and her love for him (see fig. 6). Turovskaya describes this scene as “perhaps the strongest part of the film, for unlike the short-sighted seekers after the meaning of life, she is motivated by the simplest, most concrete and unfeigned of all emotions: love.”32 Is Tarkovsky’s portrayal of love and desire as simple as to say that the latter restrains the former? Perhaps, given the director’s reflections on “the supreme value by which, as they say, man lives and his soul does not want”,33 but I am not convinced. The desire that drives pilgrims to seek out the Room cannot be wholly negative, like Augustine’s disparaging treatment of desire as craving (appetitus), for it is more substantial than mere wishes, or lust, or fancy. It is a sincerely felt hope for spiritual healing, even if it is a misplaced or misarticulated hope. Desire, as the film presents it, resists taxonomy. It cannot be neatly indexed under categories like desire for wealth, or inspiration, or flesh. If not impossible, it is at least exceed- ingly difficult to define desire in such a way. In the end, perhaps all that Tarkovsky 32 Turovskaya 1989, 114. 33 Tarkovsky 1986, 198. Fig. 6: Film still “The stalker’s wife”, Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR 1979), 02:36:33. The End of Desire? | 51www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 37–52