Solaris eclipse

I still haven’t seen the Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris. I did, however, finally set aside three hours over the weekend to watch the Andrei Tarkovsky version.

Tarkovsky’s 1972 film is typically stately and melancholic. It starts with weeds undulating slowly in a river. A horse wanders into a barn. Eventually Stanislaw Lem’s philosophically laden plot about the difficulty of communicating with a sentient planet starts its laborious exposition.

The film snaps into black and white as Kelvin, the protagonist, watches film of a troubled flight over the mystery planet. There is nothing but dense white mist filling every corner of the screen: no, wait, there is a flicker of something moving in a gap. It’s gone again, whatever it was.

Tarkovsky sublimely prefigures the journey to Solaris with a five minute sequence of cars winding through the tunnels and overpasses of a modern Russian city. This is big, confident, grown-up film-making, unafraid of becoming ridiculous. It’s saved from this by its mesmeric, shimmering, elegance.

Shortly after arriving at the lonely station above the planet (this is about an hour into the film, mind), Kelvin dares to stand with his face next to a porthole. The camera teasingly zooms into the blackness outside, then eases back again. Has something happened? It’s difficult to know.

Then, without warning, we’re back to the white mist. I strain to make out anything moving deep within it. Was that something? No, it was my shadow on the screen.

Hell, this is daring. The whiteness just goes on, unbroken. Unforgiving.

Then it goes black. And stays black.

It continues black for another minute.

Unless every review and listing of this film is in on some enormous practical joke specifically upon me, this blackness is not, I realise, part of Tarkovsky’s artistic vision.

In fact, the final two-thirds of the film is entirely missing from my tape. My lovingly produced British Film Institute video of this classic movie is a dud. Curse it. Curse it all. I am destined never to see this film; either version.

Although…

Although the Soderbergh version is now out on DVD, and I’ve seen a cheap one on sale on the market stalls down the end of my road of a Saturday. What are the odds of that being a dodgy, incomplete copy too?

Only one way to find out…