Soviet art occupies a very intriguing place in world history. Because it was formed and informed by a culture that had never existed before and never will again, it possesses a uniqueness that is very attractive. It’s all the more attractive because the communist aesthetic was never parochial. It always spoke, by design, to all peoples in all times.
Solyaris (1972, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky) is a gorgeous mess of a film. Its physical beauty and intellectual depth, and its reliance on those virtues to the exclusion of others, don’t really recommend it to most people. Tarkovsky has always made me think of Tim Burton–a talented visual stylist who isn’t always proficient at the basic filmmaking practice of having a beginning, a middle and an end.
Its length (almost three hours) also doesn't really recommend it to most people. Is it boring? Well, it's three hours long, and I will admit that there may have been a point where I considered whether sorting my laundry might be more exciting than watching whatever part of the movie was on right then.
On the other hand, I’ve never really thought that boring is the worst epithet you can apply to a movie. If you can watch orcs, dwarves, and elves go at it for over an hour in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, surely you can put up with five minutes of Henri Berton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) riding on the futuristic freeways of Tokyo. Not only is Solyaris a stunningly beautiful movie from a cinematographic point of view, but the sound design is quite unique as well. Many of the framings and sounds do not recall any Western movie that I can think of. This is a movie that is not only worth seeing, but also listening to.
While the movie may be very intellectual, the plot is not particularly complicated. The planet Solaris is covered by an ocean that scientists think may be sentient, but after decades of research all attempts to communicate with it have failed. Only three scientists are left on the research station, and one of them has died. Psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is being sent to replace him.
I wondered whether the science of “Solaristics” was a stand-in for Communism itself–a discipline which once showed tremendous promise, but which nobody really believes in any more.
The first part of the movie takes place at Kelvin’s parents’ house as he prepares to leave. This may actually be the most evocative; before we encounter the sentient ocean of Solaris, the very first images we see are closeups of the lake by the house. The fact that the house stands alone, surrounded by water, already prefigures the film’s ending.
When Kelvin gets to the station, he finds a beautiful wreck, like a motorcycle gang trashed the Discovery One from 2001–A Space Odyssey. The other scientists, Dr. Snaut (Jüri Järvet) and Dr. Sartorius (Anatoly Solonitsyn) are behaving rather oddly.
Solyaris may have its dull moments, but you can’t really accuse it of being obfuscatory or “experimental.” The fundamental problem is very clearly explained: the ocean is bringing the dreams of the station's inhabitants to life, and not in a nice, friendly way.
In Kelvin’s case, the ocean brings back his dead wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), who killed herself ten years before, when Kelvin left her. The reincarnated Hari is not a hallucination (the other scientists can see her), but she isn’t quite real, either. The immortal "guests" torture their hosts by their very existence, and then, as Hari starts to realize what she is, she begins to torture herself. This is really the point when the film starts to catch fire, and Bondarchuk's performance is very impressive. Although not a computer, she is also a sort of HAL 9000, an artificial creation that believes itself to be more than that. Unlike HAL, though, Hari may turn out to be the most human being on the station.
What's Solyaris really about? Well, there’s certainly a lot of philosophical chatter among the scientists–the discussion scene in the library made me think of Woody Allen’s Russian film parody Love and Death–but the exact meaning leaves just enough of an opening for the viewer to insert him- or herself into the debate. The original book by Stanislaw Lem is about the inevitable failure of communication with other life forms, but although the movie does do some lip service to this (Dr. Snaut: “We don’t want other worlds; we want a mirror”) it feels like it doesn’t really believe it.
The fact that Kelvin gradually comes to embrace a second chance at his relationship with Hari, and the fact that guest/ghost Hari gradually comes to feel her humanity, point more in the opposite direction. Since Hari is a creation of the ocean, the fact that she and Kelvin become close despite the obstacles between them points vaguely in the direction of the possibility of interspecies communication.
My interpretation of a movie like this, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that I finished it with a desire to go out for coffee and discuss it with somebody else.
There is plenty to criticize, if you want to. Viewers from the future of 2015 may snicker at the dwarf that toddles out from Sartorius's lab, or Dr. Kelvin’s ohhhhhh myyyyyy-inducing mesh shirt, but for a movie from 1972, it’s surprisingly rewarding for a modern viewer with a lot of patience. But know your own limits. If a three-hour movie with long takes and a lot of intellectual discussion doesn’t sound like your cup of chai, then this probably won’t be the one that changes your mind.
