(SOLYARIS)
***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Juri Jarvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Olga Barnet, and Nikolai Grinko.
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky & written by Tarkovsky and Fridrikh Gorenshtein, from the novel by Stanislaw Lem
1972 PG (predates PG13; contains images which would probably now warrant PG13)
Four years after Stanley Kubrick explored God, evolution, and everything else in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky brought the epic science-fiction novel “Solaris” to the screen. Like “2001,” “Solaris” touches on themes of technology, infinity, evolution, and the mysteries of the unknown verses man’s insatiable hunger for knowledge. While not as powerful as “2001” and lacking the budget to rival Kubrick’s visual masterpiece, “Solaris” is still very stirring, brilliant to look upon, and contains a marriage subplot that almost comes from out of nowhere to become stunningly touching.
“Solaris” begins not in outer space but with the tranquility of a lakeside farmhouse. In a film about hallucinations, even these early scenes have an eerie, unnatural calm to them. A psychologist named Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) lives there uneasily with his parents (Nikolai Grinko and Olga Barnet). This is Kelvin’s last day on Earth; soon he will be traveling to an almost abandoned research facility on the ocean planet of Solaris, where the remaining scientists have been suffering mental problems. Visiting the Kelvins is an aging cosmonaut named Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky), who has returned from Solaris in disgrace, with films of his interrogation at the hands of his off-world superiors. Burton is confident, as are many other scientists, that the very Ocean itself on Solaris is an intelligence, and the psychic disturbances are the Ocean’s attempts at making contact with the humans. The enormous distances of space travel at nearly the speed of light means that all of the men in Burton’s films have since died of old age. It also means that Kelvin’s parents will die before he returns from his mission, and there is a sad poignancy to his scenes with them. There are old wounds in this family that no one knows how to heal, and now their final chance is slipping away.
Solaris is being used for studies referred to as Solaristics; what this exactly means is never specified, nor does it need to be. Whatever Solaristics are, exactly, research on Solaris is at risk as long as the hallucinations persist, and Kelvin’s assignment is part of an ongoing decision as to whether or not the Ocean should be subjected to a lethal beam of radiation to silence its intelligence. At the research station Kelvin meets to the two surviving scientists, Snauth and Sartorius (Juri Jarvet and Anatoli Solonitsyn), as well as distantly-seen figures, asleep in beds behind quickly-closed doors, or blurred in sunlight reflected off the Ocean through over-bright windows. The station seems haunted, and soon Kelvin has a ghost of his own named Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), whose true identity I won’t dare reveal, except that we begin to see the dissembled images of his home life brought into greater clarity. In creating her, the Ocean combines evolution and creationism; the Ocean, which spawned life on Earth as well, is almost omnipotent in its power but childish in its ignorance and neediness.
Kelvin has suffered a great tragedy in his life and, in its twisted way, the Ocean is offering him a chance to mend the mistakes of his past. Sartorious scoffs at the relationship Kelvin forms with his pet ghost, denouncing Hari as inhuman, while Snauth is sympathetic, and we recall the briefly-seen human shape laying in his bunk. In a lesser film Sartorius would simply be a missile-crazed right-winger, with no patience for aliens who stand in the way of human progress. Here he is hardly less amiable, but he is a real man, and his motivation is that the individual is duty-bound to society, not to his own emotional needs. The nobility of the individual sacrificing himself for the good of the whole is the Soviet-sponsored atheist version of Christ’s passion; “Solaris” has a light touch in showing that, heartless as the state taking precedence over the individual may sound, it is usually in large groups that mankind has accomplished anything. Balancing Sartorious’ coldness is Snauth’s sympathy for Kelvin’s sometimes touching, sometimes repulsive situation, and we realize that all striving for progress and the betterment of humanity as a whole should be tempered with mercy.