When he gets there it is to a reception of none of the three scientists. Did I say three. Dr Gibarian, a personal friend of Kris's has committed suicide. The other two are aloof and unwelcoming, both are accompanied by human figures which they shoo away before Kris can get too nosey. Dr Gibarian's suicide recording is rambling and cautionary. Kris picks a cabin and rests. When he wakes it is to find his wife has joined him. He'd be pleased except she poisoned herself years before. He is already living in interesting times.
See, a plot summary of the opening of this extraordinary film does it no favours. When cinephiles utter the name Tarkovsky it is with such reverence that it should be set to Gregorian chant. The reason he deserves it has to do with something I saw him say in a filmed lecture where he put to his audience that there were two types of filmmaker: one who brings you the best version of the world around you and the other who brings you their own world. He cited Bresson as an example but then also included himself. He wasn't being immodest, just accurate.
As early as his debut feature Ivan's Childhood with its opening dream of flying and any number of scenes of warfare that seem to have been drained from a stunned reverie. If that upgrade of a neorealist war film wasn't enough, his next Andrei Rublev gave us a medieval Russia that was so barely earthly that it even started with a balloon flight and then took us through the kind of bare bones civilisation that Breughel was recording in Flanders. Already uncontainable, Tarkovsky's next feature tackled the universe itself, humankind's ambitions for it, our craving to fashion ourselves again among the starfield and the hopelessness of fighting with time. So, not quite This Island Earth, then.
Solaris begins on Earth with rich images of our natural environment, weeds underwater, a fallen bough sogging into fertilizer, happy children meeting each other in play, and rain, lots of rain. This contrasts stridently with the imagined future video, the gravity of the pilot's interrogation and the technology on show: tiny little pagers in breast pockets that light up small square screens and beep with high purpose; the video is controlled by a small console built in to furniture. A lengthy sequence of driving through tarffic which goes from sparse highways to a gigantic system of automotive veins might remind us both of the business of the human body and the interminability of space travel.
The space station itself reminds me of something it inspired, Peter Carey's short story The Chance in which an alien race invades Earth and rules by a gambling dependence, offering full body changes chosen at random by machines. Their machines are effective but sloppy with wires bursting out or repaired with gaffer tape. The beauty or terror they offered, though, by this chance is straight out of the mind of Stanislaw Lem who wrote the novel Solaris. So, corridors look unrepaired and are cluttered with casings and discarded packaging. The padding on the walls was lifted for Alien but the casual clothes of the scientists, and Kris himself, tells us that we shouldn't settle back for a joyride into future world; we've travelled across constellations to meet more like us.
In contrast, the restless waves and swells of the ocean of Solaris below change colour and even nature, now like seawater, now like liquified animal fat. The planet keeps its secrets deep beneath this tireless motion but it does seem to be trying to say something. With none of the budget of American sci-fi Tarkovsky knew he would be more effective epxloring inner space. So, when Kris's apparently resurrected wife Hari appears, she's just there, in a dress that looks like it could have been designed by Andrei Rublev. And their dialogue is the special effect. She reveals that she knows his name and that they're married but everything else ... seems to have come from his memory: she has been made from someone looking at her. Like the other extra entities on board (often called guests) Hari is not considered human but a system of stablised neutrinos. If that doesn't make you head explode...
Most of the film is given to dialogue aimed at understanding what is happening on the station and what might. Hari (through some very unfortunate incidents) develops her own self and the result is subdued but eerie. Kris's difficulty of letting go of the Earthly original and being confused about this new one feeds much of this dialogue and whether it is in those messy corridors or rooms that look as Earthly as their wood panelling we are invited to think about what experience does to fashion us, what a rejection of it might do to change that and what Earth would feel like once back there.
The film that Solaris is most compared to is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Oddysey from four years prior. Solaris was meant to be the Soviet answer to the decadent running dog American popcorn fest (there is no shortage of the sci-fi in the glorious Sovyet Union!) but instead of that we got two great movies. Kubrick's adaptation of Clarke's morphing quest forward took his film into cosmic realms to get to the intimate level. Tarkovsky's vision started little and let the cosmos appear in shades of conversation until the gut punch of the ending gave us both at once.
I've said nothing of performance here as it can very easily bend under the weight of the dialogue but the sense of wonder, fear and curiosity all at once does allow a lot of expression. Also, whatever the rest of them are doing it is Natalya Bondarchuk who commands the attention of every eye that sees her. Her baffled awe at her sudden existence develops into such wise assertion that even though her exit if offscreen we feel as though we've seen it. In constrast, she is also playing the original Hari in home movies and memories which feed her copy with vital information that is then used as counter reference uh huh, heap big self and other going on).
Tarkovsky is the filmmaker he described himself to be, a maker of worlds, his own worlds. Going from celebrity to rejection, defecting from the USSR in frustration to finally find a form of reverence in his final years, Tarkovky's life demanded the films he directed and the worlds he made with them. Are they long? Even the short ones feel long. Are they talky? Interminably. Are they beautiful? Dependably. IF you are curious about this one you may be relieved to know that presentations of it at cinemas and home video usually divide it into two parts which make it quite digestible. For my part most recently rewatching it, I found it far more engaging and narratively strong than I remembered. I had far less trouble following the often deep and dark exchanges than when younger. And, as I always do with Tarkovsky, I stepped into a strange world new again. You should, too. When you're ready.
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