| ANDREI 2005 : the re-release of Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker |
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| Wednesday, 16 February 2005 | |
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SPACE CADET : Solaris [6/10] Now 83, Polish author Stanislaw Lem is one of the world's least-known great writers: despite a string of acclaimed stories and novels (the pick of which are arguably Fiasco and The Chain of Chance), his main source of fame is that two high-profile films have been made of his 1961 book Solaris. The first is this big-budget, 165-minute, 1972 version with the impressively solid, world-weary Donatas Banionis as galaxy-hopping psychologist Kris Kelvin. The second is Steven Soderbergh's underrated 2002 flop which tells pretty much the same story in 99 minutes and stars George Clooney who is facially and physically, a startlingly close match for his Lithuanian predecessor. Neither film really gets to grips with Lem's novel - both Tarkovsky and Soderbergh emphasise the love-story aspects of the book, with Kelvin being plagued by memories (and worse) of his dead wife when he arrives on a near-deserted spaceship in orbit over the sentient planet of Solaris. Lem's field of interest is much wider, more philosophical and - perhaps surprisingly - packed full of visual opportunities afforded by Solaris's infinitely plastic surface which even Soderbergh, with all of 20th Century Fox's CGI technology to draw on, failed to embrace. Tarkovsky makes an ambitious attempt to incorporate the more intellectual taxing aspects of the source material but does so in decidedly un-cinematic means: endless scenes of bickering scientists disputing arcane points of theory. This means that the second half of the film rapidly bogs down into static tedium, and although the mind-bending finale is very much worth the wait, we have to endure all kinds of longueurs to get there. Many viewers will conclude that, as so often in his career, Tarkovsky proved ill-suited to his choice of material: he certainly doesn't seem at home with science-fiction, even the speculative kind so superlatively explored by Lem. In the end it's hard to disagree with the sniffy encapsulation/dismissal - recorded in Tarkovsky's own diaries - of the Communist Party apparatchik employed to oversee Mosfilm Studio's output: "Take-home message: there's no point in humanity dragging its shit from one end of the galaxy to the other." Neil Young February 8th, 2005 SOLARIS : USSR 1972 : Andrei TARKOVSKY : 165 mins Seen at National Film Theatre (London, UK) 13th January 2005, press show in advance of their Tarkovsky retrospective. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ZONED OUT : Stalker [6/10] Dystopian sci-fi gloomathon Stalker (1979) - a Soviet-era cross between Eraserhead and The Wizard of Oz - was supposedly Andrei Tarkovsky's favourite of his seven completed features. But, as with the similarly downbeat and lengthy Solaris, which it joins on re-release as part of the BFI's Tarkovsky retrospective - the years are not proving particularly kind. Though the film is visually striking - even at times miraculous - its screenplay (adapted from the Strugatsky brothers' novel Roadside Picnic) is a ponderous, pretentious and leaden affair. Which makes the picture a somewhat punishing - but not unrewarding - experience at 161 minutes. In a bar on the outskirts of a bleak industrial city, three men assemble for an illicit purpose. They are identified only as Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn), Professor (Nikolai Grinko) and Stalker (Nikolai Kaidansky). The Stalker has been engaged by the other pair to lead them into a nearby rural area called The Zone, kept off-limits by the totalitarian authorities after the crash-landing of a mysterious object some years before. The trio must penetrate what the Stalker describes as "a very complex maze of death-traps" before reaching The Room, a place where, he assures them, "Your most cherished desire will come true." Stalker is much more interesting to analyse and think about than it is to actually watch. The idea of The Zone, which seems to have been at least partially inspired by the still-mysterious Tunguska Event of 1908, hauntingly prefigures the mid-eighties Chernobyl disaster of 1986 - the Stalker's young daughter is a mute ‘mutant' whose psycho-kinetic powers are revealed in the film's astonishing final shot. This is merely the last of a string of breathtaking sequences studded through the course of what is otherwise a dismayingly grim, utterly humourless and frustratingly opaque two-and-three-quarter hour trek. But it would be a shame if any viewer were to be put off exploring Tarkovsky by the excessive longueurs of either Solaris or Stalker - 1974's autobiographical Mirror (a relatively-concise 106 minutes!) remains one of the medium's enduring high-water marks. So it's a real pity that he so often felt the need to spread his genius across such vast, unwieldy canvases. Neil Young February 16th, 2005 STALKER : USSR 1979 : Andrei TARKOVSKY : 161 mins Seen at National Film Theatre (London, UK) 13th January 2005, press show in advance of their Tarkovsky retrospective. Still on-line : Neil's longer (and more enthusiastic) reviews of Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker from 2001. Click here for our full ‘Tarkovsky Lounge.' |
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