Depressingly, Solaris received the lowest rating of the year at the Film Society I attend, which is likely due to its length of nearly three hours. Paul Schrader posited Tarkovsky as the “poster child for slow cinema” but his films are anything but languid. They’re filled to the brim with all that’s truly important, making reality feel like a hollow simulacrum by comparison. The often irritating and occasionally illuminating Will Self summarises Lem’s novel as “a cunning and insidious satire of Marxist theory and the entire western philosophical tradition, but also a complete satirical analogue of the way in which we try to understand and interpret the world in which we live.” 

Solaris’s surface was modestly but effectively the result of mixing various oils, in stark opposition to Kubrick’s comparatively gargantuan budget for 2001: A Space Odyssey a few years earlier. In fact, it’s become agonisingly fashionable to compare Kubrick with Tarkovsky, but as Jacques Rivette said: “Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever.” Whereas Tarkovsky was, with only seven completed feature films, the most authentically spiritualistic, transcendentally soul-enriching and genuinely existential director there has ever been, and one who profoundly understands the suffering inherent in romantic relationships, as is piercingly evident in Solaris.

The Shakespearean shades of Solaris are no coincidence; Tarkovsky relished directing his own version of Hamlet, citing the original text “perhaps the most important work of art.” Solaris, too, is a ghost story. In his diaries, Tarkovsky admits that he did not spend as much time investigating women and children in his films, and that perhaps he didn’t understand them. Hysterical characters, usually women, sporadically appear, though their scenes are far more persuasive than the histrionics of Bergman’s female characters who seem all too desperate to impart their every thought to the spectator.

Tarkovsky wrote that “Solaris is more harmonious and purposeful than Andrei Rublev”, his previous film. The director’s recurring obsession with renaissance painting (Bruegel and Da Vinci), literary classics (see Faust and Don Quixote, both of which are quoted in Solaris) and particularly Bach, whose formidable sacred compositions constitute the pointed arches of Tarkovsky’s cathedral, also contributing a ceaseless blurring effect across his filmography. He even recycles a snippet of Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s Andrei Rublev score during a particularly spectral Solaris episode. Kris gazes at a print of icon painter Rublev’s Holy Trinity as the repurposed score plays. Gorgeous hypnagogic touches like Snaut’s rustling paper attached to Kelvin’s fan echo the emblematically Tarkovskian swampy tendrils from the film’s opening earth sequence.

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Donatas Banionis as Kris Kelvin contemplates Natalya Bondarchuk’s hollow simulacrum in a gender inversion of the Pietà.