When faced with the incomprehensible, no amount of reasoning or pontificating will explain even the outline of the emotion.
Far away from Earth, in the emptiness of space is where our emotions find themselves most restless. I’ve never been in space so I’m basing this completely off of assumption, but an assumption of a space aesthete should amount to something. Alone and in the heart of the void, with nothing to distract you from the constant longing of everything you’ve left back home, the mind plays tricks on you and you project your cosy reality upon the blackness that covers you. A planet may be responsible for such apparitions in this case, but the nature of emotional connection is such that it tethers you to your anchor an entire universe away. There’s a certain line of dialogue I recall from a certain film that came out long after this one which feels rather relevant, “love is the one thing we’re capable of feeling which transcends dimensions of time and space.”
Like all of Tarkovsky’s film, Solaris (1972) is an experience, you won’t get anywhere if you try to make much sense of it, it’s the sort of film you let wash over you like waves rolling onto a shore, and you must distance yourself from the ridiculous notions of logic that make up the workings of the world we live in. It’s a mind-bending masterpiece which I felt compelled to watch after I read Solaris by Stanisław Lem. The film is a faithful and very honest interpretation of the novel, building up the same catch 22s of human progress and the mountainous obstacles that stand in the way of such puny and myopic a species. Space shrink, Kriss Kelvin gets blasted into space to check on the progress of a space station orbiting a bafflingly elusive planet, Solaris which has left the scientists down on Earth scratching their heads. Upon arrival Kelvin finds the station in utter decrepitude, what remains of the inhabitants half mad as they’re plagued with apparitions from their memories, courtesy of the planet. Kelvin’s past come to haunt/accompany (depends what way you look at it) in the form of his dead wife. Much like Mirror is a portal into a dream, Solaris is a portal into affectionate regret, the sort of regret you feel stinging you long after you lose a loved one, except the backdrop for such longing in orbit of sentient oceanic planet.
This film is art, potent and provocative, penetratingly good and personal (I’ll leave the p’s alone now)
The film dangles over a juxtaposition of nature and sterility, plenty of shots echoing this imagery, from Earth all the way into space. I find a particular scene quite touching where just before his launch into space, Kelvin stays outside while it’s raining to enjoy the rain for possibly one last time. The station is orbiting a planet, an incomprehensible twist of nature far beyond our ability to understand or even approach. Shots of the swirling ocean are sumptuously trippy, almost looking as if the planet is talking to us in a tongue we can’t receive. The camera almost acts like a satellite orbiting the characters, moving around weightlessly through the vacuum of the film. My eyes jumped with the film as it switched from one colour scheme to the next, sometimes colour, sometimes black and white and often this very faded light blue tone, moving through my eyes with Kelvin’s state of mind.
For a space movie, I saw very little space and I like that because I, and I’m speaking for a lot of people here too, don’t need to constantly be reminded by shots of space where we are. The film takes place mostly inside the space station for this is the main artery of the strangeness. Being contained within the station itself allowed me to really appreciate the meticulous attention to set design, the place really looks like the cleaners went on strike and the inhabitants just gave up, leaving me wondering how immaculate it would’ve looked when clean. Classic sci-fi curved walls with buttons and dials everywhere made me feel right at home in the station.
My ears were in a state of confusion with some of the indescribable sounds flowing through them. Some terribly aggressive sounds which almost feel as if the vacuum of space suddenly allowed sound to pass through it, break the peaceful silence every once in a while, I love such aural dynamic range. There’s one certain sequence where a long unbroken shot of a car journey is paired with the sound of what I took to be a space ship taking off that I was spellbound to. Despite the way I’m describing it, the soundscape isn’t at all a din, it’s plangent.
Science fiction and philosophy is a marriage made in heaven because with every footfall upon the road of progression, humanity pries open a pandoras box of questions. Our place in the universe becomes even clearer yet the answer is invisible. I fell in love with the book and seeing that the script is based heavily off the text, I was not disappointed at all. The story is a reality check for humanity and science. We’ve deified science as the paramount school of thought, it’s our smoking gun and we sling it around as if it’ll blow a hole in everything we point it at. This gun is a pea-shooter compared to the enigmas of the universe.
Our actors are all brilliant who convey the bizarreness of the situation as they’re visited by the eidolons of their past, meanwhile the actress playing Hari, Kelvin’s dead wife is a delicate flower without a stem, clueless of her own death and her unreality yet very much palpable and present. She is either the redemption for Kelvin’s past or a painful reminder and her delicate acting is an ironic yet brilliant surface for this.
Rightly one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time, it played tricks on my mind, heart and senses with the fact that there’s a great filter standing in the way of us, a filter past which our most advanced science fails and the only thing that gets through it is emotion and energy.
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