Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Writers: Stanislaw Lem, Fridrikh Gorenshteyn, Andrei Tarkovsky
Photography: Vadim Yusov
Music: Eduard Artemyev, J.S. Bach
Editors: Lyudmila Feyginova, Nina Marcus
Cast: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Benionis, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Juri Jarvet, Sos Sargsyan, Vitalik Kerdimun
Solaris has always struck me as the Soviet response to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the Cold War then in its high anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better period. Director and cowriter Andrei Tarkovsky reportedly liked Solaris the least of all his pictures, which would fit with being pressured into doing it (or into doing it a certain way) by Soviet elements that inevitably had a lot of control over his life and career. But I don’t know—I’m just spitballing here. Based on a novel by the Soviet science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, Solaris is heady, trippy, slow, and frequently abstracted. But it is propelled by a deeply strange premise and Tarkovsky’s usual care in putting together a movie.
A new planet has been discovered, called Solaris. It has been under study for years by Soviet scientists but remains baffling. Landing parties have disappeared, always under strange circumstances. Even the space station orbiting it seems to feel some of the effects—hallucinations, delusions, madness. More and more a majority of government decision makers argue the project should be abandoned as too dangerous and expensive. But the scientists remain fascinated and who can blame them. One theory among many is that the planet itself is a kind of giant brain, or “thinking substance.” The station was built to house a crew of 85 but it’s now down to just three and their reports are increasingly nutty. A scientist and psychologist, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Benionis), is dispatched to assess the situation, with an eye toward closing it down. What he finds there will change and destroy his life.
Solaris has always struck me as the Soviet response to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the Cold War then in its high anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better period. Director and cowriter Andrei Tarkovsky reportedly liked Solaris the least of all his pictures, which would fit with being pressured into doing it (or into doing it a certain way) by Soviet elements that inevitably had a lot of control over his life and career. But I don’t know—I’m just spitballing here. Based on a novel by the Soviet science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, Solaris is heady, trippy, slow, and frequently abstracted. But it is propelled by a deeply strange premise and Tarkovsky’s usual care in putting together a movie.
A new planet has been discovered, called Solaris. It has been under study for years by Soviet scientists but remains baffling. Landing parties have disappeared, always under strange circumstances. Even the space station orbiting it seems to feel some of the effects—hallucinations, delusions, madness. More and more a majority of government decision makers argue the project should be abandoned as too dangerous and expensive. But the scientists remain fascinated and who can blame them. One theory among many is that the planet itself is a kind of giant brain, or “thinking substance.” The station was built to house a crew of 85 but it’s now down to just three and their reports are increasingly nutty. A scientist and psychologist, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Benionis), is dispatched to assess the situation, with an eye toward closing it down. What he finds there will change and destroy his life.
I see I’m treating Solaris as a kind of space thriller with a concrete plot, but it’s not really that. It is decidedly a Tarkovsky movie—beautiful, languorous, long, resisting interpretation—and like most Tarkovsky movies I had a certain level of impatience with it for exactly that. But I will say that, on my last time through (was it really my fourth), it had more urgency and forward momentum than I’d ever seen in it before. It even has me thinking I might try the 2002 Soderbergh remake with George Clooney, which at least keeps it under two hours.
The prevailing conceit is that this sentient planet, or whatever it is, can reach into the deepest recesses of your mind and create simulacra of what most rocks the foundation of your psyche. In the case of Kelvin—a somewhat cocky bureaucrat who knows his mission really is to find an excuse to shut down the costly work—it is his wife, who committed suicide some 10 years earlier. These are not hallucinations. They are beings of some kind who exist with some apparent agency and can be interacted with and even killed (though they always self-resurrect one way or another). There’s some fancy jargon that implies they are not only not carbon-based but made up of some wholly other but parallel atomic structure, based on neutrinos instead of electrons, or some such.
In terms of their psychological impact they are perfectly real, even inescapable, and before long Kelvin is going around introducing the thing to the other scientists there as his wife. These two scientists, of course, are dealing with their own problems but at least have the decency to keep them locked up back in their living quarters. The space station has the feel of being haunted, like the spaceship in Alien. It is a wreck on the inside, trashed out because the scientists are too distracted and/or obsessed to maintain it. But at least the two others with Kelvin understand better the phantom aspects of their predicament, whereas Kelvin basically spends the rest of the movie trying to work out his marriage like therapy.
Human hubris shows up in numerous ways, but my favorite has to be the way these scientists casually discuss attacking the planet. It is when they began bombarding it with x-rays (is that really a thing?) that the problems on the station proceeding out of their own minds started. They don’t seem to get that. Now they are considering hitting it with larger and more intense levels of radiation. They don’t seem to grasp that the planet might be taking these efforts personally as attacks and responding in kind. The scientists are not exactly themselves but they are acting most like humans, defiantly committed to fighting back.
No word ever on where this planet is or how it was discovered and reached. Like the rational purpose of the monolith in 2001, it’s a little beside the point. Tarkovsky does a lot of his usual business. He’s mixing up film stocks and shifting between color, black and white, and various tonalities. Beautiful horses come cantering along (that’s back on Earth, before Kelvin takes off). The picture lingers amazingly long on a drive from the country back into the city. The shots of Solaris Ocean on the planet’s surface are vaguely psychedelic but that business is much more limited here than in 2001. I’d suggest them as a double feature, but whoa, it’s going to be a long, profound day. Stock up on all suitable supplies before strapping in for that.
The prevailing conceit is that this sentient planet, or whatever it is, can reach into the deepest recesses of your mind and create simulacra of what most rocks the foundation of your psyche. In the case of Kelvin—a somewhat cocky bureaucrat who knows his mission really is to find an excuse to shut down the costly work—it is his wife, who committed suicide some 10 years earlier. These are not hallucinations. They are beings of some kind who exist with some apparent agency and can be interacted with and even killed (though they always self-resurrect one way or another). There’s some fancy jargon that implies they are not only not carbon-based but made up of some wholly other but parallel atomic structure, based on neutrinos instead of electrons, or some such.
In terms of their psychological impact they are perfectly real, even inescapable, and before long Kelvin is going around introducing the thing to the other scientists there as his wife. These two scientists, of course, are dealing with their own problems but at least have the decency to keep them locked up back in their living quarters. The space station has the feel of being haunted, like the spaceship in Alien. It is a wreck on the inside, trashed out because the scientists are too distracted and/or obsessed to maintain it. But at least the two others with Kelvin understand better the phantom aspects of their predicament, whereas Kelvin basically spends the rest of the movie trying to work out his marriage like therapy.
Human hubris shows up in numerous ways, but my favorite has to be the way these scientists casually discuss attacking the planet. It is when they began bombarding it with x-rays (is that really a thing?) that the problems on the station proceeding out of their own minds started. They don’t seem to get that. Now they are considering hitting it with larger and more intense levels of radiation. They don’t seem to grasp that the planet might be taking these efforts personally as attacks and responding in kind. The scientists are not exactly themselves but they are acting most like humans, defiantly committed to fighting back.
No word ever on where this planet is or how it was discovered and reached. Like the rational purpose of the monolith in 2001, it’s a little beside the point. Tarkovsky does a lot of his usual business. He’s mixing up film stocks and shifting between color, black and white, and various tonalities. Beautiful horses come cantering along (that’s back on Earth, before Kelvin takes off). The picture lingers amazingly long on a drive from the country back into the city. The shots of Solaris Ocean on the planet’s surface are vaguely psychedelic but that business is much more limited here than in 2001. I’d suggest them as a double feature, but whoa, it’s going to be a long, profound day. Stock up on all suitable supplies before strapping in for that.
We saw this when it came out. I was so bored, hated it so much, that I didn't watch another film by Tarkovsky for several decades. Now I've seen half a dozen and find them tolerable at worst and, in a couple of cases (the early Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev) I even liked them. I resisted "Slow Cinema" for so long ... it wasn't until one day when I saw a list of such movies and realized some of my favorites were on the list that I was able to break down the barriers Solaris imposed on me back in '72. Maybe I should watch it again!
ReplyDeleteThis scenario you describe where the earthlings are attacking the planet and it's likely what's happening to them is the planet retaliating against their attacks but they don't get this and continue to escalate their attacks sounds very colonialist.
ReplyDeleteI get the impatience with the "slow cinema" thing but you make the film sound fascinating. -Skip