Solaris (aka Solyaris) (Tarkovsky, 1972)

The long, Soviet version of Lem's novel is enigmatic and, well, long. It has long scenes. One scene is of a person driving somewhere in Japan. I read on a bulletin board that the scene shows a car driving for five minutes. My first thought was, "That was only five minutes?" It seemed longer, but I'm not good at guessing times.

Among the movie's enigmas are why the directer bounced back and forth between color and black and white. In "Memento" we can figure it out. Here in Solaris, I have no clue. But that enigma pales in comparison with what the heck is going on. The Soviet version of the novel follows the novel more closely than Soderbergh's 2002 version, but the novel itself is a dense, thick book which has as its thesis that we will never be able to understand alien life forms, no matter how hard we try to communicate. I'll suggest that this is a metaphor for alienation in the Soviet Union under communist rule: we can never know what other humans are telling us because we can't tell if they're hiding their true feelings, trying to trap us into making criminal admissions, trying to avoid making criminal statements, or whatever. Further, there's the plain inability to communicate effectively which is shared by all humans, whether under tyrannical rule or not.

Solaris was directed by the well-known (in some circles) Andrei Tarkovsky, and it's based on Stanislaw Lem's cult science fiction novel of the same name. It stars a lot of actors I've never heard of. The costumes are true to the early 70s, and the wife of Kelvin is costumed as a barefoot hippy, and the men's clothes are all contemporary to the 70s with wide lapels and leather jackets. Or maybe that's still the height of Soviet fashion from the 40s; who can tell?

Tarkovsky swears he did not see Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" until after he'd filmed "Solaris," but I have serious doubts. The design of the space station is similar, and the end tracks Bowman's stay on Jupiter as he sees himself over and over.

In any event, the issue of the film is communication, and we see Kelvin with his father, mother, and aunt at their dacha shortly before Kelvin leaves for Solaris. Kelvin burns most of his papers; apparently his trip will take decades in earth time, and neither Kelvin nor his father expects the father to be alive when Kelvin returns. There is a cloudburst, and Kelvin remains out in it, letting it drench him.

SPOILERS--------------

Kelvin arrives on the space station un-aged, and we see the bewildering circumstances which the shipmates (Snaut and Sartorius) fail or refuse to explain to Kelvin. After Kelvin sleeps, his dead wife is in his room with him. It seems all the other crew members have had what they term "visitors," too. One crewmember, Gibarian, has killed himself. He had a visitor, but no one knows why he committed suicide. Kelvin puts his wife in a rocket and sends her off, but the next time he wakes up, she's with him again - another visitor.

The problem with the movie is that Tarkovsky can't show us the problem effectively. Lem's point of view (as I understand it, and I may be wrong) is that we won't even recognize communication from an alien - it will be totally alien to us, unrecognizable as communications. The issue isn't as simple as translating the languages; it's the problem of determining that what's going on is an attempt to talk.

The alien in this version of Solaris (and in the novel) is the "ocean" on the planet. It can move and change its shape. It appears to be reading people's memories as they sleep, then it sends a visitor to each person based on the memories. The visitors however, are all defective in some way, and Kelvin and his revived wife (Hari in this film) can't figure out whether her defect (she keeps committing suicide but returning to life) is the result of Kelvin's memory (his overriding memory is that she killed herself but he could have prevented it if he'd paid more attention to what was going on) or some defect in how Solaris is creating Hari.

Ultimately for Hari, the cause of her defect is irrelevant, and she is desperately unhappy. Sartorius figures out a way to annihilate her so that she doesn't return to life, and she leaves Kelvin with only her note. Kelvin somehow beams his encephalogram to the ocean, and the visitors stop. Apparently Snaut and Sartorius decide to depart for earth. We get a scene of Kelvin back on earth walking around the pond near his dacha, but the water is solid. He goes to the dacha, and his father is inside, where it is pouring rain, drenching him. Kelvin's father sees Kelvin, comes outside, Kelvin falls to his knees, and embraces his father. The camera pulls back further and further, and we see that the land around the dacha is an island formed by the ocean, so this scene is being played out on the planet. (This is why the water is solid and it rains indoors - the creation is always defective.)

I have no clue from the movie whether Kelvin stayed, going down to the surface and this is him we see; or whether this is a memory created by Solaris from the encephalogram, and this Kelvin is a visitor, as is the father. If this is the real Kelvin, we get a feeling of Kelvin returning home (albeit in his memory) and receiving his father's forgiveness, but for what I do not know. The reconciliation of father and son has some meaning, even if I can't figure out what the separation was; there's a communication between the two by touch and presumably by emotional feelings. This might be seen as a hopeful ending.

If Kelvin went home and this entire scene is a creation by Solaris, then I'm guessing Solaris has intuited that humans communicate by sharing emotions. If Solaris is utterly silent, then this would be a sensible guess on Solaris's part - it has no knowledge of sound and speech, so it would miss that entirely. It may be then, that after everyone left, Solaris has a key to how to begin communication. If this is the case, then the ending is bleak. The experiment in communicating with Solaris was years long and failed.

The ending for me raised issues similar to those in "Donnie Darko." Nobody could figure out what Richard Kelly was trying to say. People filled in the meaning on their own, so the interpretations of the movie varied widely, with no consensus. Perhaps ironically, I'm in the same boat with Kelvin, Snaut, and Sartorius: I have no clue what Tarkovsky is trying to tell me. I have too little information to make a guess I'm comfortable with. I could watch the movie again, but it's two hours and forty minutes, and I'm not willing to invest that much time again - ironically perhaps, like the crew leaving when Solaris finally found a key to communicating. C'est la vie.*

*I have some Russian friends, and we were discussing something over which we had no control, so I said, "C'est la vie." Curious how that was said in Russia, I asked.

Me: How do you say "C'est la vie" in Russian?
Them: C'es la vie.
Me: No. I mean "such is life." How do you say that in Russian?
Them: C'est la vie! We say "c'est la vie" in Russia.