Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk in Solaris (1972).By John Thomason
Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian New Wave’s most glorified director of rarefied museum pieces, represents, more than any director of his generation, the division between true cinephiles and casual “movie buffs.”
The latter enjoys Fellini, some Godard and even an Antonioni picture or two, but Tarkovsky’s art-house pedigree is so pure – so dismissive of the standard that films be “entertaining” – that it alienates all but the minority set of cinemaniacs whose vacation planning revolves around New York or L.A. retrospectives of Chantal Akerman or Mikio Naruse films.
Tarkovsky’s cinema is as fastidious as it is foreboding, as personal as it is daunting. Watching works as dense as Stalker and The Mirror – films I loved, though I can barely explain why – you get the impression no one besides Tarkovsky can even begin to comprehend them, and that thematic deconstruction is a fool’s errand.
His 1972 Solaris, which just received a Blu-ray and DVD reissue from Criterion ($21.99 to $26.99), is both an affirmation and an exception to the conventional wisdom on Tarkovsky. For a science-fiction film, it’s a deliberate, impenetrable frustration, but compared to the rest of the director’s canon, it’s a breezy flirtation with the accessible.
Marketed as the Russian 2001: A Space Odyssey – the first clue that this is a cerebral genre film, and one that will be dutifully dismissed by some as a pretentious bore – it follows Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), a blocky psychologist dispatched from an Edenic Earth to survey the strange phenomena on board the space station Solaris. There, he finds a skeleton crew of bedraggled scientists, one of whom recently killed himself thanks to the hallucinations prompted by the living, breathing atmosphere of the Solaris Ocean (a murky miasma that looks today not unlike the Gulf Coast after the BP spill).
He’s barely found the restroom until he too falls victim to the hallucinatory milieu, in the form of his clingy dead wife (Natalya Bondarchuk), who manages to regenerate anew, Groundhog Day-style, every time Kelvin tries to banish her.
The glacial alienation of Tarkovsky’s cinema never had a more fitting visual embodiment than the space station, a rickety edifice as functional and unromantic as a hospital. It’s not a vehicle anyone would willingly want to explore the universe’s frontiers – some of the padding on the walls conjures the look of a mental ward, a kind of character diagnosis via set design. The stirring beauty of the earthbound prologue, flashbacks and fantasy cutaways provide some release from the environs, and the station’s inhabitants movingly try to replicate its sensations onboard; a fan hitting streams of hung paper is meant to simulate the susurrus of rustling leaves.
Solaris is about many things – loneliness, spirituality, love’s uncontrollability, the transience of happiness – and it predates more movies than it’s probably given credit for. Its status as a kind of interstellar chamber drama suggests the sci-fi movie Bergman never made, and at various other points, I saw premonitions of A.I., Blade Runner and Inception. In his essay included with this disc, critic Philip Lopate also includes Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ugetsu and Alphaville. As for Kubrick’s oft-studied space trip, it’s a masterpiece of comparatively sunny tones. The up-to-interpretation final shot of Solaris – arguably the key to the entire picture – is, to me, a cruel, existential, Twilight Zone twist of utter despair, a cosmic joke from a filmmaker many have said had no sense of humor.
DVD Watch: On May 24, the ability to take Charlie Sheen seriously post-Violent-Torpedo-of-Truth is tested, in glorious hi-def, with the Blu-ray edition of Platoon (MGM, $15.49), Oliver Stone’s blunt, visceral study of servicemen in Vietnam. You’ll never again see Sheen give a better performance in a work of such magnitude. This week also saw the Blu-ray release of another tough-guy classic, Papillon (Warner, $22.49) – Franklin J. Schaffner’s well-crafted prison-break pic with Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen. The disc extras are scant, but the purchase comes with a 34-page digibook with an essay and photographs. Elsewhere, actress Samantha Morton, best seen in Lynn Ramsey’s art-house opus Morvern Callar, makes her directorial debut in the heavy drama The Unloved (Oscilloscope Laboratories, $26.99) and experimental filmmaker Chris Marker deconstructs the life and work of Andrei Tarkovsky in the essay film One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch (Icarus, $29.98). Last but most definitely not least, fans of Kids in the Hall can finally purchase the complete series of the legendary cult show in one affordable package (A&E, $74.99).
On May 31, the release of the week – if not the year – is Stanley Kubrick: The Essential Collection (Warner, $55.99 or $104.99 for a limited edition Blu-ray set). This box set replaces the out-of-print Stanley Kubrick Collection from 2001, retaining the same eight masterpieces from that set (from Lolita through Eyes Wide Shut) and adding in Spartacus and a boatload of extras. The prospect of seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon in the best video resolution available may finally make me invest in a Blu-ray player. A couple of cult genre films also make the Blu-ray cut this week: Sergio Leone’s operatic spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West (Paramount, $15.99) and Dario Argento’s giallo horror film Cat O’ Nine Tails (Blue Underground, $15.99)
On June 7, I’m most excited about a pair of long-awaited, long-unseen classics from the tragic, ridiculously prolific German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder: 1976’s I Only Want You to Love Me, about a man driven to violence due to a lack of love, and 1978’s Despair, a strange Nazi drama adapted by Tom Stoppard from a Vladimir Nabokov novel (both Olive Films, $22.49 each). This week is also a Western bonanza; the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-nominated adaptation of True Grit arrives (Paramount, $16.99 DVD and $24.99 Blu-ray + DVD combo pack), along with the Blu-ray premieres of Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (MGM, $14.99) and Clint Eastwood’s scorched-earth saga The Outlaw Josey Wales (Warner, $24.99). On June 10, Warner Archive will release Marlowe ($24.49), Paul Bogart’s obscure adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, with James Garner as the iconic, titular gumshoe.
A scene from Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958).TV Watch: Turner Classic Movies has been honoring Andrzej Wajda this month, having already screened A Generation and Kanal. Set your DVRs: At 2:15 a.m. May 29, the network will show Ashes and Diamonds, his most acclaimed war film and one of the cinema’s most humanist evocations of a soldier’s grim duty. For the whole night on June 2, get out the popcorn and record your own Mystery Science Theater commentary tracks for an evening of “Drive-In Double Features,” from 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster to 1969’s The Valley of Gwangi. At 3 a.m. June 5, TCM will screen G.W. Pabst’s 1931 Kameradschaft, a socially conscious mining drama unavailable on DVD.