A man in a blue jacket stands by a beautiful pond in the morning mist.
A feeder stream gurgles gently as the submerged swamp grass undulates
below the surface in a graceful rhythm. The atmosphere is sentient,
vaguely mystical. The man circles the watery enclave... he might be
looking for someone or something, or he might be a scientist observing
details, mechanisms, in the swampy margins... or he might be considering
suicide.
In fact he's Chris Kelvin, a middle-aged psychologist who's about to
embark on a mission to Solaris, the water planet.
While it's expressed as a journey through outer space to another
planet, Solaris is really a journey through inner
space to another soul. Solaris is a place where humans confront
identities, not aliens, ghosts, not robots. The imagery is mythical rather
than logical, which enhances the mystical ambience, suggests a religious
yearning in a godless universe.
"Knowledge is truthful only if it's based on
morality...."
Kelvin meets Burton, a man who's just returned from Solaris. Burton
tells a very strange tale about what's going on at the station. He shows
the committee a film of his approach and landing, a lyrical fragment of
sky and water that leaves the committee unimpressed and more inclined to
shut down the Solaris "study". But this visual tone poem isn't the real
news -- Burton himself is. He tells how, during his descent, he sees a
giant child floating on the surface of the planet... and the fog which
shrouds the ooze, the shapes that become a house, a garden, trees, shrubs,
a "plaster-like" parody of an earthly paradise.
They don't know it at the time, but he's describing this house, this
pond.
In a cleansing of the past, Kelvin burns his old papers and
photographs, including one of his dead wife. You get the feeling that he
doesn't expect to come back from his mission. Meanwhile Burton brings a
young boy and commits him to the care of the older couple at the pastoral
retreat (they might be the parents of Kelvin's dead wife). Burton tells
the older man that "the kid is the exact image of the one I saw on
Solaris."
The action is low-key, photographed in the mid-distance, as if
everything you see is a memory. Kelvin, meanwhile, thinks Burton is
crazy.
The next day Kelvin blasts off for Solaris, also has a rough landing.
The station appears deserted, a circle of empty corridors and chambers.
Eventually he finds Snouth who tells him that Sartorius is busy in his
lab, and that Giborian is dead. Obviously something is wrong. Kelvin goes
to Giborian's room, finds a note stuck to the monitor telling him to play
a message tape. Giborian's tape addresses the problem of what's going on
with this planet which appears to be a giant living entity. Giborian
suggests that "radiation may get us out of this deadlock... deal with this
monster." Kelvin is interrupted by a buzzing at the door -- what is it? He
shuts the tape off, then spots Giborian's automatic pistol -- presumably
the one he used to shoot himself -- and takes it with him....
"It's time to give up contact with the Ocean..."
The scientists are visited by "guests", manifestations of people from
their past. These ghosts might be weapons of the planet, a means of
destroying the intruders by driving them crazy. Or it may simply be
another level of reality. Kelvin encounters his dead wife, the beautiful
Hari. She's real enough to distract him entirely from his investigation,
and when he thinks about shooting her or himself, she kicks the gun away.
Snouth: You're lucky -- she's only your past.
Kelvin: We're talking about termination of the station.
In a desperate attempt to rid himself of Hari, Kelvin locks her inside
a rocket, fires her into space. But it's futile, as she's really locked
inside his mind, and soon returns to haunt him. Sartorius chastises Kelvin
for lack of ideological diligence and idling away his time in "a love
affair with (his) dead wife." Eventually she disappears and Kelvin goes on
a futile search of the station.
Snouth: (gives Kelvin a letter) Hari is no more.
Kelvin: How?
Snouth: Self-annihilation. A burst of light and wind.
This mystical explanation is all he gets. Her suicide is a circularity,
as is the fate of all who come to Solaris. Islands begin appearing on the
ocean like dream-spores and you're left with the proposition that the
earthly paradise of the pond and the dacha is now another
hallucination belonging to the curious sphere of water, forever an
archetype, Solaris.
And so it goes, often so ambiguous that you lose the unfolding of the
plot by being distracted by the mysticism of the cinematography. Is this
Tarkovsky's fault? He often includes images such as the black horse whose
beauty suggests significance but which turns out to be merely atmospheric.
Burton's drive into the city is another example. While it's undeniably
psychological and fits the film's atmosphere, it really seems beside the
point, included for effect... or perhaps orphaned by other scenes being
edited out. You don't mind any of this at first, as the tonality is so
integrated... but by the time you get to the long metaphysical discussions
in the station's library, the film becomes (alas) tedious and obscure to
the point of frustration. It flattens the climax, undermines the
ending.
Lem's novel has a similar poetic mysticism to that of the British
author David Lindsay's A Voyage To Arcturus-- which may have been
an influence. Tarkovsky's interpretation is excellent in terms of sound
and image and spiritual empathy. Although it's thirty years since Solaris was filmed, the technology doesn't appear dated due to
Tarkovsky's emphasis on the human rather than the technology.
So it's uneven. But you can always go with the flow....
From FCOURT
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