Solaris (The Criterion Collection)
by Andrey Tarkovskiy
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet, Natalya Bondarchuk, Nikolai Grinko, Vladislav DvorzhetskyDirector: Andrey Tarkovskiy
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Vadim Yusov
Writer: Andrey Tarkovskiy
Editor: Lyudmila Feiginova
Editor: Nina Marcus
Producer: Viacheslav Tarasov
Writer: Fridrikh Gorenshtein
Writer: Stanislaw Lem
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Russian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Anamorphic, Black & White, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 167 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-11-26
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Solaris (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: SCI-FI FOR ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Summary: 5 Stars
Don't expect lots of special effects or action sequences. DO expect a gripping tale full of poetic and philosophic musings about culture and what it means to be human. Tarkovsky's is much better than Soderbergh's 2002 version, but it's also much more demanding. It was an excruciating experience the first time I watched it, but, by the end, I knew I had seen something important. Although Tarkovsky based his movie on a novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, it's actually not surprising that Lem disliked the movie since Tarkovsky stood Lem's sensibilities on their head. Whereas for Lem outer space is an exciting--if forbidding-- frontier that is waiting for humans to conquer it, Tarkovsky depicts space as a place where humans, uprooted from Earth, become dehumanized and (no pun intended) alienated from their own nature. All the characters on the space station undergo psychological breakdowns.
Whereas the novel includes no scenes on Earth, the movie begins with a long sequence in which Tarkovsky, using slow tracking shots, immerses us in the beauty of our planet. No director I've come across has filmed nature as lovingly as Tarkovsky. We first meet Cosmonaut Kris Kelvin, the main character, as he takes his daily stroll through the woods around his father's house on the morning before Kris is scheduled to leave for the space station orbiting the planet Solaris. The movie, which opens with a haunting close-up of long, flowing, primeval-looking weeds, is introduced by Bach's meditative chorale prelude in F-minor, which imparts a spiritual resonance to the images. We slowly track across the pond to the marshy shore, where Kris stands surrounded by lush vegetation. We immediately get a sense of a man with deep connections to nature (and, later, to family). In any case, messages to the Solaris space station have gone unanswered, and Kris has been tasked with the job of traveling to Solaris and figuring out what's wrong. His report from Solaris will determine the fate of "Solaristics."
Whereas most sci-fi depicts flight technology as something that frees human beings for exploration, for Tarkovsky the leaving of Earth's surface becomes a nightmare scenario (as it does at the beginning of ANDREI RUBLEV). For Tarkovsky, a key myth seems to be the fall of Icarus. It's not surprising, then, that Kris' flight into space leads to one very dark mind-trip. Throughout the movie, Tarkovsky demonstrates a distrust of technology and, in this, he is closer to Martin Heidegger than Stanislaw Lem. In his famous <<Der Spiegel>> interview, Heidegger said, "technology tears men loose from the earth and uproots them. I do not know whether you were frightened, but I at any rate was frightened when I saw pictures coming from the moon to the earth...The uprooting of man has already taken place. The only thing we have left is technological relationships." Heidegger's statement provides a fitting summation of the movie's central theme. It is about the uprooting of man from his natural abode on Earth, and what happens to him as a consequence of this uprooting. On the space station, the men are caged like the parakeets we see in Kris' father's house back on Earth. Kris' separation from Earth is linked to alienation from parents, history, culture, and origins.
Before leaving Earth, Kris receives a warning from a retired Cosmonaut named Burton, who used to be stationed on Solaris. Burton warns Kris about strange apparitions. The planet's surface is covered by a bizarre, swirling ocean that is, at times, blanketed by impenetrable fog. This ocean takes on shapes that are familiar only to those who see them. Indeed, it turns out that the planet is a giant brain that reads people's dreams and manifests their psychological obsessions by externalizing them.
Kris travels to Solaris as a cold-eyed pragmatist, but almost as soon as he gets there his emotions take over. He finds two inhabitants alive; the third has committed suicide. The station is in a state of disrepair. The nature sequence at the beginning provides a stark contrast to the interior of the space station, which, with the exception of the library, offers a completely synthetic and sterile living environment. Tarkovsky makes it clear that the dementia suffered by the men on the space station is partly caused by their extended separation from Earth and by their quixotic dream of conquering space.
At first, it seems like the two survivors are plagued by hallucinations. However, it turns out that these "hallucinations" are real. It's not long before Solaris sends Kris his own "guest," a replica of his dead wife, Hari, who committed suicide ten years prior. In an interview (included as a bonus by Criterion), Natalya Bondarchuk, the actress who plays Hari, explains that Hari, who is really Solaris, represents "life after life. Each of us will have an encounter like that with our conscience, which no amount of earthly prayer can ever expiate or extinguish. When we leave, each of us will meet his own `guest.' It's something we are guilty of and which it's too late to correct because these people are no longer alive. And friends will tell you, `Hari's suicide was not your fault. You had nothing to do with it. It was an accident.' But it wasn't an accident, and the heart knows it. You did not love her enough, or you mortally wounded her, and she departed--for nonexistence. But it only seems that she departed, for in fact she draws closer and closer to you. The older you get, the heavier this sin weighs on your conscience, and sooner or later you have to confront it...We love only what we can lose. Home, homeland, woman." Bondarchuck's explanation goes a long way in clarifying what is, at first, an enigmatic relationship between Kris and Hari. Since Kris had never come to terms with his wife's death--or his mother's--Solaris sends him replicas of both. Kris is forced to face the guilt he feels over their deaths, a guilt that he hadn't even admitted to himself. I think many people eventually experience something like this, a feeling that you didn't appreciate someone fully when they were alive, that you didn't spend enough time with them, express how much you loved them, or were otherwise distant or unfair. This is what Kris is expiating. Of course, metaphorically, the wife/mother represents Earth. This is suggested by Hari's earth-toned Native American garb. The fact that Kris has severed the umbilicus that connects him to Earth is something for which he must atone psychologically. At first, Kris tries to destroy this replica of Hari, but eventually falls in love with her as if she were really his wife come back from the grave and he were being given a second chance. When he can no longer tell this pseudo-wife apart from the real one, his mind begins to crack. He vows never to leave this new Hari, who desperately clings to him and can't stand being away from him even for a moment. But, in a fit of delirium, he tells her, "Remember I told you I wouldn't return to Earth, that we would live here? It was all a lie." (This piece of dialogue actually comes from one of the deleted scenes provided as a bonus by Criterion.) Kris is admitting that, no matter how connected he is to this pseudo-Hari, he feels a maddening nostalgia for Earth.
But it's too late; Solaris has claimed him. Just as it reconstructed Hari for him, the protean planet has picked details out of Kris' waking memory in order to recreate Earth for him on the alien planet. (Hoping to make contact, the cosmonauts had beamed Kris' waking thoughts down to the planet, which had caused mysterious "islands of memory" to begin forming.) But the planet gets things wrong, jumbling details up so that, when Kris returns to what he thinks is Earth, he finds that things are awry. For instance, it rains indoors instead of out. The water in the pond no longer ripples, but is completely still, as if made of plastic. Mysteriously, the bonfire Kris started the day before he left Earth still smolders as if it had just been kindled. Earlier, the planet Solaris, through Hari's eyes (Hari being an extension of Solaris), had carefully studied a Brueghel painting of a winter scene that hangs in the space station's library. In Solaris' re-creation of Earth, the trees are bare just like they are in the painting (whereas they had been lushly green when we saw them at the beginning of the film). These clues make sense only when an aerial shot shows us that Kris is actually trapped on an island which has emerged on Solaris. The planet is mimicking Earth, but this imitation can never replace the real thing. This might be Tarkovsky's commentary on terraforming. In science-fiction, alien planets are "terraformed" by human colonists, who attempt to make the new planet look like Earth. Tarkovsky seems to be saying that no matter how much we might try to reshape alien landscapes in Earth's likeness, we can never replace it.
Criterion's bonus features include commentary by two Tarkovsky scholars, with whom I occasionally disagreed. For instance, they consider Burton's drive through the city (shot in Tokyo) the weakest part of the film because it doesn't seem futuristic enough. However, the way I see it, what's important isn't that the sequence look futuristic (the future is intentionally antiquated in this film), but that it contrast with the scenes shot in the country. Tarkovsky disliked the city, but loved the countyside. He's saying that the modern technological city alienates people from nature; we don't have to travel into space for this uprooting to happen. The feeling of alienation is underscored by the bizarre electronic score that contrasts with the meditative Bach music and nature sounds that we heard previously. (By the way, the music, most of it composed specifically for the film, is amazing, if subtle.) Anyhow, the car scene is brilliant because of its strange, hypnotic quality. I see an influence on Chris Marker's SAN SOLEIL and Wim Wenders' TOKYO-GA.
Some of the vicissitudes depicted in the movie parallel Soviet attempts to explore the surface of Venus. At the time, Venus, with its thick, nearly impenetrable atmosphere, was a huge mystery and caused the Russians a great deal of heartache.
Summary of Solaris (The Criterion Collection)
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