Solaris (1972)
October 20, 2024 7:43 AM - Subscribe

A psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet called Solaris to investigate the death of a doctor and the mental problems of cosmonauts on the station. He soon discovers that the water on the planet is a type of brain which brings out repressed memories and obsessions.
posted by phunniemee (11 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
Baby's first Tarkovsky.

This has been on my list for ages (I love the book) and I finally watched it. I wanted to see this adaptation first so have been avoiding the Clooney version for years until I had a chance. Really really good. For me it didn't capture as much of the anxiety/isolation/inscrutable horror side that I get from the book, but it still delivered.
posted by phunniemee at 7:52 AM on October 20 [8 favorites]


Too fast-paced.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 3:01 PM on October 20 [11 favorites]


This movie put me off Tarkovsky for decades. Now I've seen everything he ever did. I truly love Stalker, The Mirror, Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev, but this one, frankly, is one of his mid-tier films. There are a lot of long stretches which seem to have been put there to either aggravate the censors or signify "science fiction", that don't amount to much. The best thing about it is Artemyev's music.
posted by Omon Ra at 3:42 PM on October 20


Too fast-paced.

Lol. It does make the american version seem so hammy. What an American movie dramatizes, a Soviet Tarkovsky movie explains in psychologized dialogue between seated people

And more wavy plants. *Cue the drifting aquatic vegetation.*

I remember I came out of the theatre after watching this at the student union theatre, in a trance

*drifting Myrfoil*
posted by eustatic at 6:18 PM on October 20 [1 favorite]


I fell in love with Tarkovsky *because* of this movie. The slow zoom into the swirling river weeds, the long shot of the highway overpasses in Akasaka, the roiling boil of the planet below the station. It still might be my favorite of his.
posted by dis_integration at 6:19 PM on October 20 [3 favorites]


There is an alternate version of my life where, instead of being an off-putting autistic person I am a charming person who confidently builds a friend group, and in that version I am inviting people over to watch more Tarkovsky films on my stupidly large TV.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:39 PM on October 20 [10 favorites]


This is the movie that starts with an hour of driving around the Tokyo freeways, right?

While I was bored out of my mind, I came up with the theory that to someone stuck in the USSR in 1972, "look at all these Japanese expressways!" signified The Future, in the same way that 10 years later in Blade Runner, "look at all these Japanese animated LED billboards!" did too.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:19 AM on October 21 [1 favorite]


This is the movie that starts with an hour of driving around the Tokyo freeways, right?

ha ha wrong you fucking casual. It starts out with an hour of plants floating in a pond, then there is an hour of Tokyo freeway driving. Psh.
posted by phunniemee at 2:16 PM on October 21 [5 favorites]


I watched this years ago, and then watched the DVD commentary. The Tokyo scenes happened basically as an excuse for the filmmakers to leave the USSR for vacation.
posted by hydrophonic at 8:20 PM on October 21 [5 favorites]


*Ruppia, still drifting, gently*
posted by eustatic at 2:25 AM on October 22


That final shot though, man, if I had the time I'd redo that shot and splice it in to my copy. The angles are wrong, the composition is terrible - it just fails to meet the impact of the revelation. Otherwise I *love* staring at reeds and Japanese highways.
posted by Molesome at 8:24 AM on October 22


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