SOLARIS
With Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Yuri Jarvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Anatoly Solonitsin, and Sos Sarkissian.
Although portions of Tarkovsky’s film defy synopsis, it is certainly possible to describe the plot, such as it is. The film opens at the idyllic country home of Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), a psychologist, who lives there with his aging parents and his little boy. Unexplained incidents have been taking place on the planet Solaris, where a permanently orbiting space station was established many decades ago, and Kelvin has been asked to travel there alone to investigate, with the idea of closing down the space station after subjecting the planet’s oceanic surface to a final, exploratory burst of radiation.
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Snouth notes that islands are forming on Solaris’s oceanic surface. On one of these islands, we see Kelvin back beside the pond near his country house. Greeted by his dog, he approaches the house and peers through a window where he makes eye contact with his elderly father; rain is inexplicably falling inside the house, splattering books and teacups–a scene that clearly rhymes with a sudden rainfall outside the country house in the film’s opening sequence–and mist rises from his father as the water falls. Kelvin meets his father at the back door of the house, kneels at his feet and embraces him, and the camera cranes upward, higher and higher until we see the house on an island in the middle of Solaris’s vast ocean.
The fact that the only universe man can truly explore exists inside his own head is a key to Stapleton’s technique (which Clarke and Kubrick learned from), but not to his vision; in the case of Tarkovsky, it becomes the irreducible message. So it is perfectly logical that Tarkovsky came to regret the science fiction furnishings of Solaris, as provided by Lem, as a vehicle for his vision. Significantly, Lem’s novel is set exclusively on the space station; the action of the film is principally (if misleadingly) set there only so that Tarkovsky can ponder the significance of Kelvin’s country house and family.
I’m not trying to argue that a filmmaker’s religious beliefs are irrelevant to his or her art, but it does seem to me that none of the best filmmakers requires religious beliefs in order to be understood or appreciated. Bresson’s Jansenism may play some role in the selection and shaping of his plots, but divine providence is evident in neither the sounds nor the images of Au hasard Balthazar, and both Lancelot du lac and L’argent can easily be read as atheistic. Conversely, Dreyer’s Ordet and Rossellini’s Strangers (Viaggio in Italia) may both conclude with religious miracles, but this doesn’t mean that either Dreyer or Rossellini necessarily believes in them as religious miracles; both filmmakers, in fact, have made statements that suggest the contrary (and Dreyer, as we now know from Maurice Drouzy’s biography and other evidence, was not especially religious). John Huston’s remarkably precise film adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood is the work of a believer “translated” by a nonbeliever, and there is nothing in the film that suggests any obvious sort of betrayal.
