Critics reviews

It has so many sequences that are unique and unforgettable, like the part where the characters float in the library or when the wife comes back to life and then breaks apart as if she were made of glass. And there’s the idea of this spaceship floating on top of a strange ocean that seems to have some form of consciousness. All of those ideas are so strange and beautiful.

In adapting Lem's book, Tarkvosky develops a complex structure of flashbacks, dream sequences, and fantasies that are at times indistinguishable from the ‘actual' events of the plot, and alternates between color and black-and-white cinematography to further alienate us from the narrative flow.

For a movie set primarily on a half-abandoned space station, Tarkovsky's third film is more about the tangled webs of human memory, consciousness, and the lasting impressions of guilt and grief than rocketships, alien probes or even aliens themselves... Colorful, strange, brooding and evocative, Russia's answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey reaches its climax in the enigmatic final scene. Is true existence only in the mind? If so, does that make it less important?

Tarkovsky's sustained investment in conducting an orchestration of humankind's achievements and gifts, particularly those found in art and nature, have an overwhelming resonance that seems equal parts prescient and eternal. Yet, a stubbornness undergirds the film's entirety that can only be deemed conservative in its reticence to temper the technophobic rhetoric.

Tarkovsky continued to search for new ways to tell stories and utilise the cinematic space, and offers a fantastic drama that purposefully avoids most manifestation of the fantastic. And yet Solaris is often held up as Tarkovsky's most accessible and popular work, chiefly because of its lucid and powerful romanticism. That quality ironically can only be conjured in a remembered, mediated state.

Tarkovsky's speculative visions enfold the mysteries of death and rebirth, the lost paradise of childhood, the power of art to define identity, the menace of science as destructive vanity; the futuristic conceit conceals the furious sense that there's no place like home when there's no home left to return to.

For those with the requisite patience, however, it's a truly harrowing experience, in part because the inexplicable is made so unemphatic. Solaris '72 was a major influence on Lars von Trier's Melancholia—both make explicit visual reference to Pieter Bruegel's painting "The Hunters In The Snow"—and while it's possible to formulate a religious interpretation of the film's enigmatic ending, one would be hard-pressed to find any comfort in that vision.

The first time I saw Solaris was on VHS in the mid-nineties. Even though the film affected me profoundly, I never watched it again until now. The richness of the images, the vividness of the mood, and the depth of the themes are so intense, they have simmered and lived in my mind for more than fifteen years just from that one viewing. Seeing it again, going from VHS to this new restoration, is truly a revelation. It's like owning a pristine 35 mm print.

The film helped initiate a genre that has become an art-house staple: the drama of grief and partial recovery. Watching Solaris is like catching a fever, with night sweats and eventual cooling brow... True horror is in having to watch someone you love destroy herself. The film that Solaris most resembles thematically is not 2001 but Vertigo: the inability of the male to protect the female, the multiple disguises or "resurrections" of the loved one, the inevitability of repeating past mistakes.

If 2001 is the intellect, the mind, the more mathematically precise and optimistic of the two, then Solaris is the messy heart of inextricably entangled emotions, imbued with grief and prone to no shortage of creative tangents. To know thyself, one must look both within and without; each film explores the realm of the human soul—namely, where it comes from and where it's heading—and are no less compatible than any two sides of the same coin.

I like watching this master of imagery wrestle with the problems of creation and perception, and I relish, perhaps perversely, the aroma of frustrated reaching that seeps out of the characters' relations to their own experience, and occasionally out of Tarkovky's relation to Lem's heady material. One genius works to touch another, and the results are mostly exquisite, but the restless, difficult space between them is almost as compelling.

If Tarkovsky's conclusion seems a little grim, it may be a small comfort to remember that moviegoing is itself a fairly solitary experience. Sitting in the dark... we for the most part are individually affected, especially when confronted by a film as deeply personal as one by Tarkovsky. And perhaps this isolation is what we look for in a film — not escapism, but intense self-examination. As Snaut says of space exploration, "We don't want any more worlds. Only a mirror to see our own in.