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Tarkovsky’s mysterious epic – a response to the ‘phoniness’ of 2001: A Space Odyssey – draws you into its melancholic dreamworld superbly

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The best arts and entertainment during self-isolation

At university in the early 90s, friends who were studying philosophy would enthuse about Solaris in the same smoke-filled breath as Hegel and Sartre – neither of whom I had read. But I felt at ease with nerdiness, in a room crowded with techno music and people lying about on the floor. Vicariously I became a purist, without ever watching the 1972 film by Andrei Tarkovsky nor reading the original novel by Stanisław Lem. And when Steven Soderbergh’s slicker, shorter, altogether shinier adaptation, starring George Clooney and Natasha McElhone, was released, I knowingly let it pass me by – why have Hollywood cotton when you could have Soviet silk? So it has taken me more than 25 years and the lockdown of a global pandemic to make time for Tarkovsky’s film, only to find that the more you attempt to understand Solaris, the more it defies explanation.
Generations of scientists have risked their sanity trying to make sense of its sprawling ocean, a vast living organism that appears to be sentient; none has succeeded. The doomed hero of this story is Kris Kelvin (played by Donatas Banionis), a psychologist and expert in the field of Solaristics, who is dispatched to the station that orbits the planet to evaluate whether or not the troubled mission should continue. Its dwindling crew is under siege from mysterious figures – phantasmic incarnations of their own shameful memories and fantasies that seem to have risen up from the depths of the sea. Kelvin is greeted by devastation: his colleague Dr Gibarian has killed himself, while the other cosmonauts – Snaut and Sartorius – are hiding away in their cabins. The “visitor” that will drive Kelvin to the edge of madness is a simulacrum of his lost love, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), who killed herself long ago. He awakes in a dream to find her sitting before him – and so the living nightmare begins. Continue reading...