The second movie in this series, Andrei Tarkovksy's Solaris, a lot more closely conforms to what you'd think I mean by the term "one-timer" than the first movie, Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals. Both films do have in common the fact that I saw them for the first time in 2013 -- and that comparative recency probably explains more than any other factor why I haven't yet seen them again.
Solaris, as you would know if you've seen it or if you know Tarkovsky, is long, ponderous and slow-paced, the sort of film you would definitely only watch once if you didn't care for it, and might take a while to get back to even if you did. In fact, given that the other two Tarkovsky films I've seen in the years since then -- Stalker and The Sacrifice -- have not worked for me as well as the #172 ranked Solaris obviously did, I was definitely concerned about the possibility of this just going over my head and seeming as ponderous as the other two, on a second viewing.
But I don't think "ponderous" always has to be a negative appraisal of something. Tarkovsky's film is ponderous, and I think that's the best thing about it. (And it made me want to revisit Stalker, which I didn't dislike but which definitely tried my patience more with fewer rewards, while actually bearing a lot of similarities to Solaris otherwise. Before I do that, it would probably be best to see the three Tarkovsky features I haven't seen: Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev and Mirror, the latter of which also has a good copy on YouTube, which is where I saw Solaris. Not even any ad breaks!)
My affection for Solaris was especially noteworthy given the baggage I brought in, which was seeing Steven Soderbergh's remake ten years earlier and not caring for it. I suppose that might have made me more receptive to a good version of Solaris, but it could have also made me wary about the possibility of any good version existing. Now that I've seen the original two times, and confirmed my affection for it with a rewatch, I'm wondering if I might be more open to what Soderbergh was doing, or just more critical of it. That's another rewatch to consider some day.
My first viewing of Solaris was around the same time that I decided I really loved Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which Solaris owes a few very small debts. My two twenty teens viewings of 2001 were what elevated it all the way up to #12 on my Flickchart, the first of which was only two weeks after I watched Solaris (and no doubt inspired by the fact that I'd just seen Solaris).
Tarkovksy's film does capture the eerie and unnerving qualities of unexplained occurrences in outer space that Kubrick gave us in such a memorable way four years earlier, but it doesn't really use space the way you imagine it would. Although the sense of being on a space station is clear, especially with our views of the ocean planet below, we get almost none of the traditional space backgrounds you'd think you'd get in a movie like this, with stars twinkling against a sea of infinite blackness. I recall exactly one, and it serves more as a transition between the scenes set on Earth (which run longer than a half-hour to start the film) and those set in space. Once the characters are in space, Tarkovsky is not that interested in continually reminding us of that fact through shots of space or footage of anyone doing a space walk. Everything we see can be, and obviously was, shot on Tarkovksy's very earthbound sets in Russia. (2001 was not shot in space, of course, but when I was younger, I believed it was.)
So it's a credit to Tarkovsky's movie magic that we never doubt our location. The sets themselves look like we imagine a space station would look, or rather, a space station that was inhabited entirely by Alzheimer's patients, as it's been left in disarray with various objects strewn about and loose wiring letting off sparks. Then the images of the swirling surface of the ocean planet, whose swirls ebb and flow and change according to the mysteries that are unfolding for the characters, are chilling in their otherworldliness.
Though I think if there's one single key to why Solaris gets under our skin, it may be the sound design. Every sound is chosen for its maximum pscyhological impact on us, as it mirrors the mental dissolution the characters are experiencing as they walk this space station and see the physical embodiment of some person from their past, inexplicably walking the corridors next to them. I don't find the moment-to-moment experiences with these characters, one in particular (the dead wife of Chris Kelvin), always chilling, though individual moments are quite so. The scene where she's banging on the door to get out of it -- and then bursts through the metal as though it were wet cardboard, leaving jagged edges -- is quite effective in that regard.
Because of its length (2:42) and the practical necessities of my Sunday schedule, I split Solaris in half the way the movie itself splits itself in half after about 1:19. Although you'd think you'd be under the movie's spell more as it reaches its climax, I found myself more gripped during the first half, which include those establishing scenes on Earth and all the shots of nature around Chris Kelvin's home. This film definitely relies on anticipation of what's to come in creating its mood.
I really get a lot out of the portion of the film that you wouldn't think would really be eerie, which is the character Burton explaining his experiences while on a previous rescue mission to the surface of the planet to try to find two lost crewmen. We see an older version of Burton, alongside Kelvin and a few others, watching a hearing of a younger version in which Burton explains what he saw. A hearing does not seem like the sort of place we'd become entranced by the film introducing its concepts to us.
But here is where Burton talks about seeing a massive infant four meters long on the surface of the planet's oceans, and later reveals that the infant had the appearance of the orphaned son of one of the lost crew members, something Burton only realized later when he met that son. Even twice removed from the actual events -- a character watching his own verbal account of this experience -- it sets our imaginations alive.
And here I think is part of the film's very small debt to 2001, only because the ending of 2001 also involves the image of an infant, the Star Child. It's such a small debt that I hesitate to even mention it, because Tarkovsky is clearly doing his own thing here and not ripping off Kubrick in any way. Maybe both of them realized that seeing images of small children in outer space, where they certainly should not be, is pretty eerie.
Okay I've used enough synonyms for "eerie" and "unnerving" and "chilling" for one day.
