Solaris (1972): Tarkovsky's Answer to Kubrick

Andrei Tarkovsky did not care for 2001: A Space Odyssey. He thought Kubrick’s film was a sterile catalogue of hardware, technically dazzling and emotionally frozen, science fiction that mistook the machinery for the meaning. In 1972 he made his reply. Solaris, adapted from Stanisław Lem’s novel, is the space film as a study of grief, guilt and the unbearable weight of memory, and it opens on reeds waving in a stream outside a country house on Earth, no rocket in sight,, held for so long that you begin to understand you are being retrained in how to watch.

The reply landed. Solaris shared the Grand Prix at Cannes, became the Soviet Union’s most respected science-fiction film, and has spent fifty years being called the anti-2001 by people who love both. It runs to about 167 minutes in its full version, it moves at the speed of memory, and it remains one of the few films in the genre that treats outer space as a mirror for inner space and means it.

The premise, and the ocean

Kris Kelvin, a psychologist played by Donatas Banionis, is sent to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris, whose surface is a single vast ocean that appears to be a living, thinking thing. The tiny crew has fallen apart. One scientist is already dead by his own hand; the two survivors, Snaut (Jüri Järvet) and Sartorius (Anatoly Solonitsyn), are haunted, evasive, half-mad. Something is happening on the station that they cannot bring themselves to describe, and Kelvin has been sent to decide whether the whole mission should be abandoned.

What the ocean does is the film’s central device, and it is fair to describe because the film reveals it early. Solaris reads the minds of the people orbiting it and manufactures physical people out of their deepest memories, guilty ones especially. These “visitors” arrive unbidden, made of the crew’s own remembered grief, and they are solid, warm, and convinced they are real. Kelvin’s visitor is Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), a recreation of his wife, who took her own life on Earth years before. He gets his dead wife back, made of his own guilt, and the film is the study of what a decent man does when the universe hands him exactly the thing he could not stop mourning.

Why the slowness is the argument

Tarkovsky’s long takes are the most famous and most parodied thing about him, and Solaris front-loads them almost as a dare. The opening stretch on Earth — the pond, the house, Kelvin’s father, a horse, rain falling on a table set outdoors — takes its time to the edge of provocation. There is a notorious sequence of a character driving through motorway tunnels and overpasses, shot in Tokyo standing in for the city of the future, that runs for around five minutes of near-abstract traffic. Audiences have always fidgeted through it, and the fidget is the point.

The slowness is doing precise work. Tarkovsky wanted you saturated in the texture of earthly, physical, remembered life — water, foliage, weight, the specific weather of home — before he took it away, so that the sterile white corridors of the station would feel like an amputation. When Hari appears, the film has already spent an hour teaching you what Kelvin has lost, so her return does not read as a plot twist. It reads as a wound reopening. Kubrick’s cuts push you forward through spectacle; Tarkovsky’s holds trap you inside duration until time itself starts to feel like the subject.

His visual grammar reinforces it. Colour drains and returns across the film; some sequences shift into monochrome or sepia and back, marking the borders between memory, dream and the present without ever labelling them. Water is everywhere — dripping, pooling, running in the ocean below — and Tarkovsky uses it the way another director uses a musical motif, a substance that means life, memory and the unconscious all at once. Over it plays Bach’s organ chorale prelude in F minor, arranged by Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score, the sound of a cathedral heard from underwater.

The Bruegel and the argument with Lem

There is a moment on the station involving Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Hunters in the Snow, which hangs in the library and which the camera studies in loving detail — the tiny figures, the birds, the frozen village. It is Tarkovsky pausing his space film to contemplate a four-hundred-year-old image of ordinary earthly life, and it is one of the most beautiful passages in his work. It also tells you what he thinks science fiction is for: a way back to the human, the earthbound, the remembered. The genre’s outward gaze is, for him, a route to the inward one.

Lem, it should be said, hated the film. The Polish novelist thought Tarkovsky had ignored his book, which is a cold, rigorous work about the impossibility of ever understanding a truly alien intelligence — the ocean as a mind we can never communicate with, a rebuke to human self-importance. Tarkovsky took that premise and made it a domestic tragedy about a man and his dead wife, which was, from Lem’s chair, a betrayal. Both men were right about their own film. Lem’s novel is the greater work of ideas; Tarkovsky’s film is the greater work of feeling, and it keeps the novel’s central horror — that the alien reaches into us and we mistake its output for love — while turning that horror toward the heart.

The real ancestor of this, and its heirs

The obvious framing is Tarkovsky-versus-Kubrick, and it is a real dialogue: 2001 (1968) is the thesis and Solaris is the counter-argument, two of the towering science-fiction films of their decade shot on opposite sides of the Cold War and the aesthetic divide. But the truer ancestor of Solaris sits outside the genre. It descends from the great Russian literature of guilt and moral reckoning, Dostoevsky above all — the study of a conscience under unbearable pressure, transposed to orbit. Tarkovsky filmed a Dostoevsky problem and gave it a spaceship.

Its heirs are everywhere once you know the shape. Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 Solaris with George Clooney is a lean, honourable American remake that trades Tarkovsky’s duration for a ninety-nine-minute chamber melancholy, and it is far better than its reputation. The whole modern school of slow, sad, contemplative science fiction runs through here: Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 are unimaginable without Tarkovsky’s example that the genre can grieve and pray. And Tarkovsky’s own Stalker, seven years later, is the essential companion, the film where he pushed this method to its limit.

Spoilers below

The cruelty of Hari is that she learns what she is. This recreation of Kelvin’s wife slowly comes to understand that she has no independent existence, that she is a projection of his memory made flesh by the ocean, that she cannot leave the station or exist apart from Kelvin’s mind. In the original, the human Hari killed herself; here, the visitor Hari attempts it too, drinking liquid oxygen, and cannot die, because the ocean simply regenerates her body. She is condemned to a love that is not hers and a life she did not choose, a being made entirely of another person’s guilt and unable to escape it. Bondarchuk plays her dawning self-knowledge with a tenderness that makes the film almost unwatchable in the best way.

Kelvin’s arc is his surrender. He begins as the rational investigator sent to shut the mission down, and he ends having fallen completely for a woman he knows is a phantom, willing to stay in orbit forever rather than lose her a second time. The other scientists eventually find a way to stop the visitors from returning, and Hari is gone, and Kelvin is left with the same grief he arrived carrying, now doubled.

The ending is the most argued-over passage in Tarkovsky’s cinema. Kelvin appears to return to Earth, to the country house from the opening, to his father — and the camera pulls back to reveal that the house sits on a small island in the ocean of Solaris. Home has been recreated by the planet, exactly as Hari was. Kelvin has not gone home; he has been given a copy of home, and the film ends inside the same trap it studied, with a man kneeling before his father in an embrace that echoes Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son, unable to tell, or unwilling to ask, whether any of it is real.

That final reveal is the whole film’s argument delivered as an image. Kubrick ended 2001 by launching a man past the infinite into a cosmic rebirth, looking outward and upward at transcendence. Tarkovsky ends Solaris by bringing his man back down to a kitchen and a father and rain on the windows, and then quietly poisoning the comfort by showing you it is manufactured. The reach for the stars, in Tarkovsky’s hands, becomes a long way round to the truth that what we are really haunted by is home, and the people in it we failed.

My verdict: Solaris asks more patience than almost any film in the genre and repays every minute, provided you meet it on its terms rather than demanding it behave like the space films it was made to rebuke. Start with the full Mosfilm version at its proper length — the Criterion restoration is the one to seek — give the opening hour your full attention rather than your phone, and then watch Stalker and understand why Tarkovsky is the director every serious science-fiction filmmaker eventually has to answer to.