Solyaris

• Soviet Union • 1972 • 167m •

• Directed by: Andrei Tarkovsky. • Starring: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetskiy, Nikolay Grinko, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Olga Barnet, Vitalik Kerdimun, Olga Kizilova, Tatyana Malykh, Aleksandr Misharin, Bagrat Oganesyan, Tamara Ogorodnikova. • Music by: Eduard Artemev.

The Solaris mission has established a base on a planet that appears to host some kind of intelligence, but the details are hazy and very secret. After the mysterious demise of one of the three scientists on the base, the main character is sent out to replace him. He finds the station run-down and the two remaining scientists cold and secretive. When he also encounters his wife who has been dead for seven years, he begins to appreciate the baffling nature of the alien intelligence.

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Review:

The intellectual at the helm of this meditative psychodrama, Andrei Tarkovsky, formed a view of cinema that he called "sculpting in time." By this he meant that the inimitable feature of the medium is to take our experience of time and diversify it. Unedited movie footage interprets time in real time. By using long takes and few cuts, he aimed to give us a feeling of lost and passing time, and the connection of one moment to another. He also uses water, clouds, and reflections, along with their symbolism, such as waves or the form of brooks or running water. Bells and candles are also widespread indications of film, tonality and vision, and Tarkovsky's adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's Polish novel has a recurrent motif of introspection.

Despite its agreed distinctions from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky definitely uses more deeply distinctive characters and a more tempestuous human drama at the center than Kubrick. Notwithstanding, retrospect lets us discern that the two masterworks are more alter egos than contradictions to each other. Both set up their stories in a measured, unhurried style, giving bountiful duration to tracking around the Earth and space sets. Both make use of widescreen mise-en-scène that extracts top-drawer art direction. Both create an atmosphere of mystery that attracts umpteen interpretations.

Unlike 2001 nevertheless, Solaris is drenched in somberness, which clinches the film even before it leaves Earth. In this pensive prologue, we see the protagonist, a purposefully detached space psychologist named Kris Kelvin, staring at underwater reeds as though they were the death of a helpless animal. Played by the stoic Donatas Banionis, Kris looks perpetually wounded, slowed by some grief beyond description. His father and aunt worry about his apathy, chide him for his humdrum temperament. He is about to take off the next day for a mission to the space station Solaris, a has-been project which has been left awry: It will be his job to conclude whether or not to close down the research station.

Humans seem enslaved by machinery and TV images, disconnected from the nature around them, underwater reeds, a thoroughbred horse, a farm dog. In his persistent shots of freeways, Tarkovsky spurns capturing any but contemporary cars. Why mask the present world in sci-fi apparel, when the alienating future has already barged in?

At Solaris, Kris finds a desolate space station, forsaken save for two distracted if not delirious scientists. A colleague Kris had expected to meet has already committed suicide, leaving him a recorded message hinting of vividly imagined Guests who have "something to do with conscience." Sure enough, Kris' dead wife Hari substantiates at his side, offering the committed affection for which he is starved. She is played in a mind-blowing performance as one of the most endlessly complicated characters an actor could play. We progress into a dogged inversion of conventions: Real terror is in having to watch someone you love devastate herself, the incapability to protect a loved one, the manifold facades or reappearances of the loved one, the inevitability of repeating past mistakes.

The true impact of this cinematic development comes from the agony of Kris' resurrected love for Hari, his eagerness to do anything to hold onto her, even knowing she isn't real. The about-face between color and black and white channels something of this metaphysical inconsistency. Centrally, it's a common love story obstructed by a scientific problem. Hari wonders aloud if she has epilepsy, and later we see her body disturbingly convulsing at the edge between being and non-being. Can he only love her if she is human in the sense that everyone else is? I mean, love is love. An elegant, tranquil levitation sequence, when Kris and Hari lose gravity, conveys another characterized likeness of this supernatural periphery. We humans are used to unattainable love, but can any of us experience inescapable, penetratively unifying love?

In the mean time, Tarkovsky thickens the dialogue with provocative assertions about reality, identity, humanity, and sympathy, reinforced by citations of civilization's rivets like Bach, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Brueghel, Luther, and Cervantes. The Soviet censors may have been pacified by the lack of the word God, but Tarkovsky takes the customary science- fiction theme of spacemen determining "contact" with other phenomenons of intelligence, and enhances it virtually to juxtaposition with absolute being through the alien planet's ocean with its cognizant Chthonic functions, embodied by literal islands of thought. Indeed, the planet in question is a symbol for something the contemporary human condition is not able to understand or accept.

Review by jzappa from the Internet Movie Database.