Solyaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)Adam & Sam's takeYou know, I really thought I would understand this better the second time around. It certainly didn't feel that way watching it, in part because I was wondering about the ending all the time... regardless, I still loved it.
Yes, it's slow, and long. Compared to Andrey Rublyov, it's also unfocused. But that feels appropriate : there's a reason the guy we follow in this space station is psychologist, not a physicist. The comparison to 2001 is inevitable, but despite their similarities (sci-fi, highly acclaimed director, late 60's-early 70's, thematically ambitious, extremely deliberate pacing), Solyaris is messy where 2001 is controlled through and through. I saw a review about Solyaris saying it would have you reaching for a razor, and... I guess I can see that but completely disagree. If anything I read it as an invitation to appreciate life in all its aspects, though I also have an "optimistic" reading of 2001, so maybe that's my personal tendencies showing more than anything else.
I can't exactly say I have a reading of Solyaris though. I keep coming back to the word "messy", but that's also because its ambitious : it's about love, grief, existential doubt, identity, truth, and of course the implications of "the Contact", as they call it... and I don't feel anything I can say about it would in any way be as satisfying as the experience of watching the film. Those first 40 minutes, which basically serve as an extended prologue, already feature some stuning imagery (see above) and conclude with a very long series of shots from the point of view of a car in traffic that is the epitome of Tarkovsky's style (from, you know, the grand total of thre films I've seen). It's long, and will seem utterly pointless and endlessly frustrating if you're not exactly on the film's wavelength. It's also my favorite sequence of the whole film, making you look at these banal landscapes as if you were, well, completely alien to it (see also : Under the Skin). There's also something which I took to be a mistake on first viewing, but seems too obvious to be unintentional : the use of sudden rain in what is very clearly a sunny day : almost as disconcerting as the rain inside the house at the end, and again making the familiar seem bizarre.
There's a similar scene much later, though much less extreme, where we are just looking at a painting along with a character (literally, since the camera focuses on one specific part of it at a time), which I might call a vacuous attempt at profundity 9 times out of 10, but here it works. Part of it might be that Tarkovsky is not exactly afraid to have his characters actually talk about those themes, yet another technique that can often backfire pretty spectacularily, but works well here : Snaut's birthday party being the main example, especially the points Snaut makes about humans being more interested in infinitely expanding Earth than actually exploring the universe, something that obviously applies to discrete humans as well.
I guess I'll end with my one petty complaint, which is the sound mixing of dialogue, which is just a step above Italian-style dubbing (better synchronized, but still sounds wrong). It works well enough in the first fourty minutes which are meant to feel "off" anyway I think, but detracts a bit from the "sense of dread" Sam was talking about once on the station, because it prevents the kind of complete immersion needed for that.
9/10