Andrei Tarkovsky was a 24-year-old film student when he co-wrote and co-directed, along with fellow student Aleksandr Gordon, this gripping, suspenseful, philosophical version of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 “The Killers,” a short story that consists almost entirely of dialogue—dialogue so craftily repetitious and, given the deadly situation in which it arises, piercingly comical that one wonders about Hemingway’s influence on the postwar tragicomedies of Beckett and Ionesco. Regardless, Tarkovsky’s film seems less absurdist than the story, which is perhaps the finest thing that Hemingway wrote; it is more attuned to the story’s sense of imprisonment, people’s solemn incapacity to escape the confines of dead-ended lives. Tarkovsky directed the long first scene in the diner and the brief concluding one there; the scene in between, in Ole Andreson’s threadbare hotel room, was directed by Gordon. In this trapped middle, Andreson is lying in bed, his face up against a wall; his back is to the camera as the door closes on him. Nick Adams, his friend, had come to warn Ole that two hit men are looking for him; but Ole is tired of running. He will wait for the strangers to execute his fate. The room he is in is indeed one to die in.
In the closing scene Nick and George, the counter person, talk. Nick has just returned from warning Ole. “I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick announces. George encourages him to do just that; and George’s tone of voice, his depleted spirit, suggests that he once, and often, encouraged himself to do the same. But he is still stuck in the same place; and his example helps us to realize, shatteringly, that Nick isn’t going anywhere either.
For Tarkovsky, one must wait for death to “leave” Soviet Russia.
Dennis Grunes 