Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Solaris
Steven Soderburgh and George Clooney’s remake of Andrei Tarkovski’s legendary Solaris dispenses with almost the entire first half of the original film, cutting the running time in the process from 3+ hours to just less than two and removing whole layers of personality development from the lead character, psychologist Chris Kelvin (played in the new version by Clooney). The dizzying car journey through a starkly de-colorized urban Russia of the future is lost. Kelvin’s contextualising interaction with his father and son is lost. The beautiful opening shot of soft green reeds gently rippled underwater is lost. Friends of mine have suggested that the spirit of the film is lost too, that the original’s slow, ruminative beauty and austere philosophy is diluted, ignored even, by Soderburgh’s stylish treatment and Clooney’s star power. I’m not so sure though.
The updated Solaris moves fast; barely ten minutes in and Kelvin is already on his way to the space station orbiting the strange planet of iridescent seas and luminescent mists. Tarkovski’s version took an hour to get this far. While I may defend the right of an artist to use slowness, stillness and length in a piece, understanding and appreciating the cathartic powers of near-hypnotic repetition and stasis as well as the alluring intricacies of vastness and the unashamedly widescreen imagination, from 20-minute jams by Miles Davis or Can to three hour cinematic masterpieces like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia or Amadeus by Milos Forman, I also love brevity. Directness. Focus. Some things need three hours to unfurl, others barely quarter that time (Spielberg’s recent AI would have made a wonderful 30-minute short, but became an endurance test after 60-minutes; by the two-and-a-half-hour mark I was cursing him). Most things would benefit from the sympathetic touch of a good editor (Auspicious Fish included!). As such the new Solaris is now a manageable length (the DVD of the original is split between two discs, meaning you have to change them halfway through, and although it was always intended as a two-part affair this is still incredibly frustrating in the digital age), much less daunting and wearisome.
Tarkovski can’t compete for simple visual sumptuousness either; he may frame every shot like a beautiful still-life but budgetary and technological limitations meant that the planet Solaris itself, supposedly shrouded in swirling, spectrum-ranging mists, was nothing but an indistinct grey blur 30 years ago. Today it is a shimmering, translucent aura of red and blue, rendered digitally with beautiful, mesmeric precision. The space station in Clooney’s homage also looks like an actual space station (or at least like a mimetic Hollywood vision of one) rather than a hastily-evacuated Soviet boiler room (one thing capitalism does best is special effects!).
But these considerations are neither here nor there if the essence of the film is lost. Is it? Solaris is a treatise on the nature of personality, on the question of what makes us human. The planet Solaris creates facsimiles of people from the memories of those sentient beings in its orbit, that is those upon the space station circling and studying the planet. Hence Chris Kelvin is confronted with the all-too-physically-solid spectre of his dead wife Reya, and his (dead, by the time Kelvin arrives) friend Galbarian is visited by his infant son (daughter in the original). The crew of the space station understandably react negatively to the arrival of these doppelgangers; are they ‘real’? Are they human? Are they dangerous? How is one meant to feel about and towards them? What value is the simulacra, even if it is so perfect as to be indistinguishable; how can you love something, someone, when you irrefutably know they are not ‘real’? (It is unconfirmed in both versions of the film whether or not all the doppelgangers are of dead people; whether the book both films are based on states this concretely I do not know.) The question for Kelvin is does he love this new ‘copy’ of Reya or does he love her memory? Is this new Reya a ‘copy’ anyway? Her personality and memories are created from reflections of Kelvin’s own memory of his wife, hence the new Reya is an incomplete person, a Golem with the looks, voice, gestures and demeanour approximate of the ‘real’ Reya (exact of Kelvin’s memory of her), but sans the dasein. A notion I have long been intrigued by is that we are as other people perceive us to be, that our objective, definable personalities are relative to how we are perceived by those around us, that our intentions and feelings matter not until they are understood. Indeed, our misapprehended and falsely inferred thoughts, feelings and intentions are much more important in terms of our identity. What use is the ‘real you’ if no one but yourself ever encounters it? The ‘real you’ is the you that people deal with everyday.
Clooney’s Kelvin is a blank slate. We are given little or no family information or background for him, and the film only portrays him in unusual, stressful conditions and in flashback, thus only giving us a picture of Kelvin under extreme duress and in the past, and leaving him as a two-dimensional vessel for the projection of our associations and memories. We think of other things we know about Clooney, of his private life, of ER, of Oh Brother Where Art Thou, of Out Of Sight and of Ocean’s Eleven. We think of the original actor who played Kelvin in Tarkovski’s version. Likewise the film itself is a blank slate emotionally. Too many questions are raised and too many images unexplained for it to be fully emotionally engaging, and likewise it is too emotionally confused for it to be a reasoned academic philosophy. But this is the point. The planet Solaris creates blank vessels for the projection of desires and loves, confusions and memories, and by giving our subconscious free-reign over the design of these resultant simulacrum stretches the limits of our consciousness and our conscience. Confronted by our impossible and unreasoned memories given physical reality, we short-circuit mentally and emotionally; when Kelvin is first met by the projected Reya of his memories he is so confused, disgusted and tortured that he lures her into an airlock and blasts her into space. When the subsequent Reya discovers this act of betrayal she breaks down. Much like Mary Shelley’s monster of Frankenstein’s creation, or Pinocchio, or Buzz Lightyear, the simulacra Reya wishes to be real, to be human, to be more than just spectacle and projected, redirected fantasy, memory and misremembrance. Clooney’s hollow Kelvin becomes like the heroes of Jorge Luis Borges' meta-fiction at this point, aware of his fictionality; Reya is constructed from his memories but he in turn is but a character, and a poorly drawn, unrounded character at that, hence she is an echo of an echo. His fictional nature is accentuated, doubling the falseness of the simulacra Reya in turn. The boundaries of reality and fiction, of story and history, of empathy and antipathy, become blurred to the point where they don’t exist. At the end of the film it is made explicit that they're works of fiction when Reya states "we don't need to think about it anymore", the inferrence being that once they assume control of their own fictional context they can be happy by guiding their own narrative. If Kelvin can project positive thoughts onto Reya, consciously assume control of how he perceives her (indeed, of who he perceives), then he can control his own responses to her by influencing her character, who in turn can influence him until the issue of who is real and who created who is dispensed with as they become symbiotic.
Tarkovski’s original Solaris may have more completely involved the audience by painting a fuller picture of Chris Kelvin, by drawing the viewers in through sheer length of involvement with the film, but for my money Soderburgh and Clooney’s version tells the story and emphasises the philosophy better. The glossiness of the digital effects and CGI of their version add to the sense of unreal which is the essence of the film; the appearance of reality is so sharp and luminous that we know it must be false, the space station so perfect and detailed and Hollywood in its facades that we know that too is not real, is hyperreal. We’ve all seen what the inside of an actual space shuttle looks like and this is not it, but we know instantly that it symbolises the space station at one further remove; a signifier that only signifies another signifier in turn. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein concealed the its heart and meaning in multiple-layers of remove, telling the story at a further distance with each further onion-skin of narrative until the essence of it is told in something like the 7th person, the characters becoming so false and one-sided that all which can exist is the story and the meaning without distractions.
The new Solaris asks us what defines us, how people perceive us, asks us to think about what composes and creates ourselves, and demands to know if we love actual real people, or merely the impressions of people that we choose to avail ourselves of. Is it a better film than Tarkovski’s? I couldn’t say; but I certainly don’t think it’s any worse. And I shall definitely be watching Tarkovski's version again over the weekend.
8/27/2003 09:25:00 pm
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