Tarkovsky Season: Solaris (Dir Andrei Tarkovsky, 2h 46m, 1972)

Solaris is certainly, alongside Stalker (1979), the most famous, and arguaby the most accessible of Tarkovsky's films, from being an adaption of the critically acclaimed Polish novelist, Stanisław Lem's best-selling novel 1961, to a full-on Hollywood remake at the hands of Steven Soderbergh, in one of the few English language adaptions of any work that matches up to the qualities of the original. In its depiction of a grounded, grubby version of interstellar space, and upon the people that inhabit it, from their memories to their encounters with unexpected and often emotionally draining experiences, Solaris is not only a highlight of Tarkovsky's filmography, but in science fiction as a whole, pushing it forward into an exploration of the self as much as the vastness of space that colours the genre in films as disparate as 2016's Annihilation and Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) to the cult sci-fi horror movie Event Horizon and even Alien.

It is also where his style unquestionably comes of age, in the form of what today could now be considered as "slow cinema; whilst other filmmakers, from Bergmann to Antonioni could be regarded as the godfather of it, Tarkovsky is its adoptive father and teacher, steadily turning the verité of the French and Italian New Wave into an altogether more poetic and ruminatory form of cinema, typified by voiceovers, long, painterly takes, and a style of cinematography that borders on the abstract, particularly seen in the swirling fogs and the rolling waves of Solaris itself. But it is also, possibly, the film in this most unique of filmographies, in which its creator rarely returns to concepts, where the film's struggle towards being at once art and pure cinema, where, to commit perhaps the greatest of faux-pas against Tarkovsky, the film feels bloated and overlong, its glacial pacing rather than slowly unfurling into an object of beauty like Rublev simply circling, as the whirlpool on Solaris does, the point, reluctant to step out of the dreamlike state towards an sense of finality, and a conclusion.

The years between the struggle of Andrei Rublev and the remarkably painless release of Solaris are an interesting one of Tarkovsky. Rublev's release in the USSR was, as previously noted, troubled, a butchered cut only arriving a year before Solaris in 1971, Tarkovsky had divorced his first wife, Irma Raush in 1970 and remarried, to Larisa Tarkovskaya, a production designer on Rublev, with a son being born later in 1970. Tarkovskaya would later essentially become an uncredited assistant director on Tarkovsky's films between 1972 and 1983, and act in the highly biographical Mirror (1975), whilst their son, Andrey, has essentially become the chief proponent of his father's films, and the director of the 2019 documentary, Andrey Tarkovsky. A Cinema Prayer.

Despite Rublev's rocky release, Solaris' production was, by many accounts, relatively painless, although the rejection of his script for White White Day, later to become Mirror, starts Tarkovsky off on a journey that would eventually see the film maker leave his native Russia for Italy and beyond, before his eventual exile in 1985. Utterly key to Solaris, though, is understanding it as a reaction, conscious or otherwise, to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)-certainly, Tarkovsky singled it out as a target, daubing it as shallow, phony and a facsimile of life. Certainly, there is an undeniable sense of a reaction in sections of Solaris against Kubrick's cold logical tale of overtly western expansion into the stars; Solaris' future is not that of the sleek and the clean and the clinical, but of the grubby, run-down and lived-in spaces of Solaris Station. Whilst not immediately comparable, Solaris's tale of man losing touch with God as he journeys out into the reaches of space and comes across other worlds feels like a retort to the deity-less, overtly western, and scientific pragmatism of 2001 from a Russian point of view.

In essence, Solaris explores two concepts in great detail. The first is human exploration, and here we circle back round to address the comparisons with 2001 in greater detail. Certainly, there are comparisons to be made on how these films address many concepts-they certainly share passing narrative elements, from the majority of the film taking board upon a spaceship, and their startling, metaphysical endings, but comparisons between them are undoubtedly overstated, especially when their very difference exemplifies the divide between Western and Soviet cinema. 2001 indeed, is a tale of obliquely Western space exploration; a space computed by IBM, and flown by Pam Am, where the moon is colonised and where, in the bluntest way possible, a positively Conrad-esque mission into deepest space ends with its protagonist going native in a post-humanist evolution into something more.

Moreover, 2001 is a film stunningly without emotion, a hyper-pragmatic forerunner of the "hard" science-fiction, that, whilst already a burgeoning subgenre of the medium (ironically including the novel Solaris is based upon), only grew in popularity post 2001. 2001, like much of Kubrick's work, runs on logic, even in the closest the film comes to brushing against religion, and indeed a deity, in the form of the ominous monoliths and their creators that punctuate and conclude the film. It may be a universe with a higher power, but it is not a deity-Kubrick's universe, already evoking Nietzsche's spirit through Thus Spake Zarathustra, goes one further, and removes an unknowable god from the picture.

Solaris, in sharp contrast, almost deliberately counters both of these themes. First, there is something stunningly anti-colonialist about Solaris. Late in the film, Dr Snaut (Jüri Järvet, voiced by Vladimir Tatosov) puts it perfectly; much like the growth of colonial empires slowly undergoing, as for example the moon base in 2001 perfectly depicts, a transformation into a recognisable and familiar form, so "We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly." Far from this exploration being the natural next step out into the stars, Tarkovsky sees it as harmful, wilful, a separation from not only God but our planet. This, unquestionably, is why he prefaces the events of the novel with almost an hour of events on Earth, including the meeting of our protagonist (Kris Kelvin, played by Estonian actor Donatas Banionis, though voiced by Vladimir Zamansky) with his father on earth, as well as the cosmonaut Berton, who has been utterly changed by his experiences on Solaris.

Here, Tarkovsky's camera lingers upon the natural, upon the rain in cups outside-the sudden downpour that catches Kelvin is superbly shot, the dacha cosy, cluttered, detailed with a life. If there is a common thread between Tarkovsky's films in their visual ambition it is in the natural, either unsullied, the mundane made beautiful in painterly long takes, or sullied or juxtaposed by the unnatural or the corrupted, the Solaris station and the Zone of Stalker. Even when the film cuts to the-at the point, shockly modern-represented by Tokyo's express ways, in an astonishing long-take sequence filmed initially in black and white then cutting to colour as we approach the epicentre of the city, it is on a human scale, though the lack of organic, of the green spaces of the opening sequences, gives this sequence an unsettling sense of a prelude to the utter artificiality, the unsettling bleakness of space.

For, if Solaris and its titular Station has any visual lasting legacy, it is in the lived in, grubby, brokenness of this vision of interstellar life. Gone is the crisp cleanness, the utilitarian, the intrinsic uncluttered visuals of 2001 and in its place is a slowly collapsing, underused, battered location; a dumped computer, cluttered mess, trash left in the circular corridor that forms a ring around the station which forms the primary location wherein the characters interact. It looks a dump, it looks like somewhere people actually live. The individual rooms follow this closely; far from the clinical locations of 2001, they are littered with objects, they are filled with life, with things that reflect their owners, from the religious icon in Kelvin's own room to the clutter of Snaut to the burnt material and life left behind by the deceased Gibarian. But there is something intrinsically wrong about the location.

Whilst one room, the study in which the film's scientific discussion, the revelation of what exactly is going on on and below the surface of Solaris, and why this has led to unexpected visitations from memories made flesh in the form of silicone lifeforms, is wood panelled, and with paintings, including Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, which Tarkovsky lingers upon late in the film, elsewhere there is a sense of this location being curiously liminal, of being fragile and at points disturbing. Kelvin stares outward into the blackness of space outside, or scenes are lit by the unseen weak light of Solaris, in blueish white light. Together with the unwelcome welcome that Kelvin is given on first arriving at the station, there is something, in bluntest possible terms, creepy and, yes, alienating about the location, in the half-seen passages, the figures of Snaut and Dr. Sartorius (A returning Anatoly Solonitsyn) peering from behind door, or stalking its corridors, in their gone-native insularity. Above all, Solaris gives us a vision of space not as a bold frontier but a cramped and boilerplate, and uncomfortable place.

We see reflections of this colossal stone, this massive change in how the spaceship looks, ripple down the decades. Unquestionably, Star Wars captures both Tarkovsky and Kubrick's design philosophies-the Imperial and Rebel capital ships are clean, utilitarian locations but the Millennium Falcon is unquestionably Solaris' station in miniature, a grubby bucket of bolts battered with wear and age. Alien's Nostromo is a similarly lived space, whilst Scott smartly takes more than a few allusions from Solaris' depiction of space and its ever-present horrors in both his depiction of the alien planet and the yawning void of a cold and infinite space itself. Even television series like Doctor Who, already masters of the low-budget workaround, takes on the taut and claustrophobic design of the Solaris station, swapping British quarries for sound-stages. But few of these films, focused as they are upon the location as opposed to the juxtaposition that Tarkovsky perfectly sets up against our homely earth, captures the wrongness of a stretched out, interstellar existence.

For this juxtaposition between Earth and Solaris is more than simply a case of locale and tone, but goes as deep as soundtrack and how Solaris is shot. Here, Solaris uses classical music, including Bach, for Earth, in the form of the overly religious Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, and electronic music/ambient sound for Solaris itself, composed by Eduard Artemyev, a compromise after Tarkovsky's initial plans for the film to have no score whatsoever. Solaris' music is strange, electronic fluidness that often breaks down into mounting electronic sound that borders on static and noise music. Against this overtly alien music, comes the theme for Hari, (Natalya Bondarchuk), the deceased wife of Kelvin, restored to life by the uncanny abilities of Solaris, which marries the overtly religious sense of Bach's music to Artemyev's score, the only sense of these two disparate worlds coming together in the form of a restored life spent on earth resurrected by Solaris's alien science.

Moreover, Tarkovsky's step into colour is nothing short of a revelation-though the Eastman stock used throughout this film came not only at a high economic cost, but quarrels with his cinematographer up to Solaris, Vadim Yusov, would break the partnership that began with Ivan's Childhood. Elsewhere, restored at last by Criterion in another of their revelatory remasters, the original blue and white tinting of the original release, curiously missing in some older releases on home media, are back, giving the worlds of Tarkovsky an utterly alien look that only adds to the dreamlike quality of much of this film, something only expanded on in the changing stocks and film in his next two films (Mirror and Stalker) to deliberate aesthetic effect.

Tarkovsky, already now entrenched against the USSR for its cuts and censorship against Rublev, stands his ground this time, and refuses to cut the frequent mentions of religion from Solaris-this alone, even for a figure that battled with his faith throughout his life, better seen in the overtly religious behaviour of the Stalker in Stalker, there is an innate sense of some spiritual force in the lives of those on Earth and on the Solaris Station, in the excerpts from Bach, adds the film an innate sense of the religious, of the personal, as does the cameo of a Rublev icon upon the wall. But more importantly, Solaris is a film about people. 

 

For, if anything demarks the difference between 2001 and Solaris it is this-Kubrick's film is about humanity, in great sweeping terms, Tarkovsky's is about people, the great ideological concepts of Solaris concentrated down into seven characters, that of the three cosmonauts, Kelvin, Hari, Kelvin's father, and Berton. Berton and Kelvin's father (Nikolai Grinko), capture the magnetism of Earth-the forces of a benevolent father are seen perfectly in the sparing flashbacks of Kelvin's childhood, whilst Berton seems to act as a warning, a prophet, of the unnerving power of Solaris, though, with his reputation in tatters, and seen as a madman, he wanders broken and, in the sequence shot in Tokyo, seems stunned and stunted in an extraordinary tinted long take of his staring eyes as he travels.

Kelvin, in sharp comparison, is a pragmatist-the reappearance of his wife, Berton's testimony, even the death of his friend and colleague, Gibarian, only seen via existing black and white footage, and the disturbing and secretive behaviour of Snaut and Sartorius, none seem to openly break him, and it is not until the film's final third that the cracks in him appear, leading to the film's stunning final sequence in which our very expectations are skilfully played with as Kelvin seemingly returns to his father, only for Tarkovsky to pull the single masterful twist ending, and unquestionably the moment that Tarkovsky's meditative film lands better than Soderberg's more sprightly remake.

But he is not a man without emotion and it is this, above all, that juxtaposes him perfectly against Kubrick's Bowman-we learn little about Bowman throughout 2001, we learn so much more about Kelvin, we see him deeply affected by the sudden reappearance of his wife, we see him disturbed by the loss of his friend and the secretive and bizarre behaviour of his colleagues. Like Conrad's Marlow, we see him thrust into the heart of darkness of space, to meet not a flesh and blood Kurtz, but a metaphysical one, forced to come face to face with the utterly alien presence of the ever stormier Solaris (a technical, and almost abstractly shot locale), in the form of Hari.

And it is Hari that truly feels like the heart of this film-whilst many other science fiction writers and film makers have explored the human condition, the concept of artificial life (Tarkovsky, later in his career, would single out James Cameron's The Terminator as a true vision of the future) ad nauseam, there are few performances as affecting as that of Bondarchuk's, a performance that bubbled over into her own relationship with Tarkovsky and her attempted suicide after he rejected her advances. Hari, simply, is a stopped life suddenly continued, a creature of memory, who curiously rummages through her husband's luggage to find a picture of herself, a construct that the film plays with perfectly as she embodies everything from childish new-born curiosity that films like I Robot and Spielberg's A.I. captured to the seductive feminine, later seen in Blade Runner, as she attempts to comfort her husband.

Bondarchuk lends her a stunning quality-we see her struggle with her existence early after her appearance, not to mention a stunningly abstract moment where the film layers several takes of her as Hari into a dizzying collection of what seems to be multiple Haris-or perhaps the blurring of time as she tends to the injured Kelvin. There is, unquestionably, a sense of the alien to Hari, a certain uncanniness to her performance that only grows through the film as she becomes self aware, leading to the openly distressing sequence where she is discussed by Snaut and Sartorius as though she is not there or cannot understand them, leading to her attempted suicide from which she returns to life, bloodied and utterly convinced of her own existence.

One could certainly, though I feel somewhat unequipped to give this great visually and thematically dense film an in-depth feminist reading, regard this, in sharp contrast to previous films in which Tarkovsky's women are either dead or innocents, regard this as something of a sea-change in how he deals with women, in a figure that fully echoes the complicated concepts of humanity and femininity in the USSR in the 1970s. She, without a doubt, is where the film is at its strongest, at its most concentrated.

For, to commit cinematic heresy of the highest order, elsewhere, Solaris is oddly baggy, overlong, and almost too leisurely, too poetic, too wrapped up in itself. Rublev, a full twenty minutes plus longer, never feels like it wastes a moment, but Solaris' pace is, at points, lazy, its visual poeticness occasionally feeling more like a film overstaying its conceptual welcome. This is not, for a moment, to detract from the poetry of the film at its strongest, but in a couple of moments, especially in the film's opening third, Tarkovsky's visual eye becomes tired, his editor, Feiginova, occasionally too sparing in her editing of the film.

From another vantage point, though, its length only adds to the sense of this often dreamlike (or indeed, nightmarish) sense to the film-shots hang for perhaps a few seconds more than they need to, not through lack of brevity, but in a sense of uncanny, and occasionally disturbing comfortableness; the Tokyo sequence, as it rolls on, becomes less of an alien modernity and more an entrapment, this world without human scale, of cars and towering skyscrapers and a language that few of its audience would understand only preparing its audience, in both the West and the USSR for the further alienation of Solaris and the station. The station set sequences only capture this more, the camera hanging, slow, lingering, even before Hari appears, to utterly change the film's focus and relationship between the familiar earth and the over-extended, prying, unwelcome humanity that stretches out in search of other Earths and find only memory.

Of the seven films Tarkovsky made, few come close to Solaris-it may well be the master director at his most accessible, dare one say it at his most commercially minded and mainstream. Unquestionably, it changed science fiction cinema, allowed it to become a more conceptual forum, where the great concepts from what it means to be human to the very idea of human exploration among the star to first contact on a conceptual and physical level, could be explored in films as disparate as Blade Runner and Interstellar, and in other mediums. There is, much as there is science fiction before and after 2001, there is science fiction before and after Solaris.

But Solaris is more than just an impact on its own medium-it feels, unquestionably alongside that other dark exploration of three men entering the otherworldly, in the form of Stalker, the highpoint of Tarkovsky's filmography, an astonishing piece of cinema that explores not only the very concept of space exploration, and indeed exploration and colonialism, but human nature, from its focus upon human art as a symbol for the human condition, to the ever-present sense of memory and loss, all wrapped up in a film that explores our lapse in faith, our inability to escape our memories, and its sense of raw emotion in a genre hitherto focused on the impersonal and the logical. It is a majestic, incomparable piece of cinema.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)