From Here to Solaris: A Space Odyssey

The voracious remake machine called Steven Soderbergh has finally reached a sacred cow: Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris, which is slated for a James Cameron-George Clooney upgrade this Thanksgiving. Truth be told, Soderbergh's film is supposed to be a new adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel of the same name, but New Yorkers have the opportunity to catch Tarkovsky's original version, which shows up at Film Forum for a week-long run starting this Friday.

Tarkovsky, though without a doubt a master, is an extraordinarily complicated, contradictory figure. Unlike the oeuvres of many other great directors, in which the very cinematic form of their works creates the content of their film-universes, Tarkovsky's approach often feels as if there is a total split between what Tarkovsky-thinker wants to express (most often in long, sometimes tedious philosophical speeches) and what Tarkovsky-director wants to put on screen: the dazzling world of shifts between black and white and color, track-zooms, swirling fog, decay, mud, endless rain, and characters huddled close to the ground. Tarkovsky's best features, 1975's Mirror and 1979's Stalker, are the two in which the two Tarkovskys actually seem melded; elsewhere (though I haven't seen Andrei Rublev), the still-extraordinary cinematic movements exist to varying degrees apart from the sometimes questionable philosophical musings.

Solaris takes this bifurcation so far that it actually inverts it, meaning that the film's cinematic power is relatively minimal. Its success depends largely upon the metaphysical conceits at the heart of its story. Nevertheless, the opening is mesmerizing: Bach's Chorale Prelude in F Minor plays over the credits, and the first image we see is green reeds wavering in the current of a stream. Just as 2001 toys with our expectations of being dumped in the far future by starting at the "dawn of time," Solaris opens in rural idyll which, if not for the videophones and cars, might as well be timeless. It is the childhood home of scientist-psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), who is about to be dispatched to a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris.

The rhythms and mystery of this section are tantalizing: Kelvin's relationship with his aging father remains ambiguous, and the natural world is a palpable force as a rain shower breaks out in broad daylight while Kelvin's daughter frolics in the grass. A Solaris veteran visits the house and plays a videotape of his inquest after having returned from an expedition to the planet itself: he had had a vision of a giant baby, yet the footage he brought back showed only clouds. Kelvin then leaves for Solaris; the film's best sequence follows, consisting simply of Kelvin sitting in a driverless car moving on the highways of an anonymous yet apparently Japanese city as the 'scope photography inexplicably shifts between black and color.

Once Kelvin arrives at the space station orbiting Solaris, the movie descends into a relatively uninvolving, numbingly slow, exploration of his inner life. At first, it appears that the movie will take a turn toward becoming a Val Lewton picture: the decaying station strewn with typical Tarkovskian detritus is populated only by two remaining crew members and varying forms of ghosts--a child in the hallways, a mysterious midget. However, the airy Lewton elements are soon cast into the monolithic white elephant trappings of a Bergman film.

Kelvin's wife Hari (Natalya Bondarachuk) is re-created if not resurrected. The planet Solaris apparently has the power to create matter from brain waves; we later find out that the real Hari had committed suicide after the breakup of their marriage. Solaris has been compared to Hitchcock's Vertigo for its exploration of memory via the device of bringing a woman back from the dead. While superficially similar, Solaris offers the opposite of Vertigo's delirious passion. Unlike Jimmy Stewart's Scottie Ferguson, who isn't aware of the folly of his obsession until he has let his love plunge to her death a second time, Kelvin is a far more inert, totally non-psychotic character. Even though his first reaction to the reincarnated Hari is to put her in a rocket and blast her off the space station, he uses her resurrected presence as an opportunity to explore his own faults and why his actual marriage failed, which is explored mainly through long, long dialogues.

The general tedium of the film's final two hours are relieved in one astonishing scene: the space station enters a zone of zero gravity, and Kelvin and Hari float together as Bach's music returns on the soundtrack. However, even with the weight of that scene and the equally mysterious if far less powerful conclusion, Solaris is probably Tarkovsky's weakest work; unfortunately, it also remains his most famous.