Solaris

Andrei Tarkovsky's maximalist adaptation of Solaris, a novel by the Polish science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem, reproduces faithfully all of the book's plot points.  But there is much more:  a bizarre city of the future sequence, a perverse and tormented family out of Chekhov or Dostoevsky, and remarkable idiosyncratic imagery peculiar to Tarkovsky's own obsessive concerns.  Lem's book is one of the greatest of all science fiction books, dense with philosophical debate and crammed with mind-boggling descriptions of the colloidal ocean world of Solaris, a giant alien brain and sentient entity with which the book's hapless cosmonauts seek to make contact.  Tarkovsky can't manage the spectacular special effects that would be necessary to replicate Lem's alien world, a vast turbulent cauldron that specializes in constructing facsimiles of human artifacts the size of Mount Everest.  Accordingly, the movie inevitably falsifies Lem's concept (the Polish writer was distressed by the adaptation, although he reluctantly approved it) -- Tarkovsky has designed the film to substitute for Lem's verbal arias depicting the monstrous structures fabricated by ocean entity his own Proustian memories of childhood and the characteristically poetic and dream-like imagery by which the director embodies the emotional significance of the dysfunctional (and possibly incestuous) family drama that he tacks onto the Polish writer's plot.  The result is a huge film moving at a glacial pace, morose to the point of morbidity, sinister and clogged with long stilted scenes of theatrically inflected dialogue -- a movie almost three hours long and, for half of its length, terribly dull.  Lem's short novel takes place entirely on the ocean-planet; half of Tarkovsky's film is set on earth (or what seems to be earth) and features the director's signature water-logged landscape, the sudden bursts of falling rain in which he delights, the eerie dogs wandering a landscape that seems somehow both idyllic and post-apocalyptic.  Lem's book is mostly about ideas and it is very minimally plotted -- the narrative involves the colloid-ocean's creation of replicants, that is, simulacra of human beings, who appear to the three cosmonauts stranded in the decaying space station.  It is unclear whether the ocean has fabricated these facsimiles of human beings as "gifts" or to console the sad and lonely scientists or as some form of punishment or torture.  The novel's hero, Kris Kelvin, is stricken by sorrow because ten years before the book begins he left his girlfriend, called Rheya in the book (Hari in the movie) with the result that she committed suicide.  On Solaris, Rheya appears, seemingly alive, but possibly constructed from the Kelvin's memories of her -- each of the other cosmonauts is afflicted by another replicant, although Lem is tactful enough to keep these creature invisible and undescribed.  (Tarkovsky follows this strategy, grasping that what we can't see is more terrible than what is shown to us -- the other two surviving scientists on the Station, one has killed himself, are also tormented by "visitors" or "guests" but we are never shown them.)  In Lem's vision, closely followed by Tarkovsky, Rheya exists as a form of retribution for Kelvin's previous sins -- she clings closely to him and can not be destroyed, although he tries to get rid of her by blasting the simulacrum into space.  Rheya is suicidal and seems to kill herself several times.  As book and film progress, she becomes more and more human, to the extent that Kelvin falls in love with her even though it is suggested that she is a merely a cunning artifice, a woman made from a swarm of neutrinos that the other cosmonauts are plotting to destroy with their "neutrino dispersers." The theme of Lem's book is that human beings can not successfully make contact with, or communicate with an alien entity, in part because our own lives are controlled in large part by oceanic and subconscious urges and desires -- how can we hope to communicate with alien beings when we don't really understand our fellow humans or, even, the abysmal depths of our own soul?  All of these issues are proclaimed at great length in Tarkovsky's film and embellished with the director's autobiographical obsessions:  Tarkovsky's father was a great poet, immensely loved and admired by his son; but the family was unhappy -- there was a divorce and the young Tarkovsky was forced to choose between his parents, electing, it seems, to live with his mother with whom he formed a quasi-incestuous bond:  his father was at war and young Andrei was the "man of the house".  (These details are portrayed in Tarkovsky's greatest and most personal film, Mirror.)  In many respects, Solaris is a first-draft for the explicitly autobiographical concerns of Mirror.  Kelvin confuses Rheya with his mother and has brought with him into outer space images of his dysfunctional family.  Ultimately, Rheya seems to be banished in favor of an image of Kelvin's mother, possibly herself a simulacrum or, maybe, simply a memory.  But Kelvin's final redemption requires that he effect a reconciliation with his father, a man that he has insulted and injured on Earth.  In the film's extraordinary final minutes, Kelvin seems to return to earth and kneels like the prodigal son in Rembrandt's painting before his father on the wooden steps of the family's rural dacha.  The pond near the dacha is frozen; the family's dog is still alive and a little bonfire lit by Kelvin months or years ago is still fitfully burning.  In the dacha, a slow, cold rain is falling although Kelvin's haggard father ignores the big drops splashing on his shoulders and destroying his books.  Rheya's apparition has led to the disclosure of the perverse family drama involving the hero's silent mournful mother and, at last, a reconciliation with his father -- although the true meaning of this reconciliation is withheld until the final grandiose shot.   The family drama is Tarkovsky's innovation, the superimposition of his private concerns on Lem's book.  The movie is  much too long and tedious. The actor playing Kelvin is semi-comatose; he mopes around for the entire three-hour length of the film, a perfect portrait of disabling (and infuriating) melancholy -- you want to slap him out of his torpor.  The 19-year old Natalya Bondarachuk (the daughter of the approved Soviet film maker of the era, Sergei Bondarachuk) is very effective as Rheya, both strange and poignant.  But she is also severely depressed and repeatedly destroyed only to be resurrected -- needless to say, her performance is also very dour, hushed, and sorrowful.  Tarkovsky's trademark effects involving Chagall-like levitating lovers, interior rainstorms, miniatures that mimic larger structures, and decomposing and mildewed rooms and chambers are on display and these things are always wonderful to behold.  Ultimately, Tarkovsky suggests that Solaris, the ocean-brain, symbolizes the creative urge, the human drive to create representations of reality that are beautiful, meaningful, but invariably flawed.  The creatures manufactured by the sentient ocean are defective -- they are like the film itself, a vast, complex imitation of existence that contains inexplicable, obsessive elements.  During one lengthy sequence the camera simply explores a Brueghel painting -- the point is to dramatize nostalgia for Earth, but, also, Tarkovsky means to show us that the human brain can create life-like simulacra for reality, that we are all artists continuously constructing an image of the world from our own memories.  Film, Tarkovsky, seems to suggest is, itself, a theater of the memory -- we create images ceaselessly but these images only reflect ourselves and have only a fragile and contingent relationship to the outside world. 

Although Tarkovsky's film is a melancholic masterpieces, it is also badly flawed.  In particular, there are inexplicable images so misplaced as to seem risible.  In one philosophical debate, Tarkovsky doesn't know where to put the camera so he just dollies it into the ear of one of the speakers.  One sequence, in particular, has always baffled me -- this is a tour of high-speed freeway in some Asian country.  The scene doesn't contribute to the narrative and simply shows cars moving along elevated freeways and, then, plunging through tunnels -- it's about six to eight minutes long.  I previously regarded this sequence as a metonym for space travel -- Tarkovsky couldn't afford the special effects necessary to show a space ship taking off and so he simply substituted the freeway sequence for the launch scene.  Viewed in that light, I've always thought this sequence particular bold and innovative.  But, listening to the commentary on the DVD, it seems that I'm mistaken.  Tarkovsky wanted to show the City of the Future on earth and so he procured a visa to travel to Japan.  There he simply attached a camera to a moving automobile and zoomed around Tokyo's futuristic (in 1969) freeways.  The sequence doesn't work at all and, viewed in light of the commentary, is idiotic.  But it's also a cheerfully opportunistic -- Tarkovsky wanted to get out of the Soviet Union for a month or so and wanted to meet the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and so he invented the City of the Future sequence as a subterfuge to justify a junket to Japan.