by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972.
Starring: Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Nikolai Grinko, Yuri Jarvet, Sos Sarkisyan, and Anatoli Solonitsyn.
Rating: 5/10, 10/10.
This film is tremendous.
Take a scene early in the film, before we really know any of what’s going on plot- or character-wise. A man is driving a car through a vaguely futuristic cityscape. He is alone. There is no dialogue, no voice-over, no music. Just shots of the car, the street it’s on, the cityscape. All we hear are the little noises the car makes. This sequence beautiful, gorgeous, completely enrapturing for its entire length. How long does it last? Almost fifteen minutes, probably.
This is one of the film’s many strengths. It’s nearly three hours long, and it uses the length so very well. Perhaps a more timid, more "economic" director could have fit this material into an hour and a half (interestingly enough, Soderbergh's recent remake, which I have not seen, does exactly that), but that film would have been missing out on so much. This story, this concept needs space to breathe, and Tarkovsky was not afraid to give it all the space it needed.
The film also uses an interesting techique with colour. Most of the film is in regular colour, but every once in a while, for no apparent reason (and I mean apparent, because there are reasons) it will switch into black and white.
The basic concept is that four men, Snauth (Jarvet), Gibaryan (Sarkisyan), Sartorius (Solonitsyn), and one other whose name escapes me were sent to the planet Solaris in order to study its mysterious, living and possibly sentient ocean. But then the fourth man whose name escapes me died mysteriously, so a fifth man, Kris Kelvin (Banionis, in an absolutely fabulous performance) is sent to replace him. When he arrives on the planet, he finds the station in disarray, manned by three paranoid, seemingly delusional men. He also finds his wife, Hari (Bondarchuk), who has been dead for seven years. The explanation for all this comes slowly, at a sublimely perfect pace.
read roger ebert's essay on Solaris