The American director Steven Soderbergh created his own version of "Solaris", the book by Stanislav Lem, which has already been adapted into a film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The basis of the story is science fiction, but Soderbergh puts the emphasis on the human psyche
John Rockwell
George Clooney and Natasha McLaughlin in "Solaris". In the first book and movie the wife dies to save the husband; Soderbergh provides a different interpretation
Is it possible to turn a suspense story about an impossible connection with aliens into a great human love story? Steven Soderbergh believes the answer is yes. The director of "Erin Brockowitz" and "Traffic" is marketing his new film, "Solaris", as a love story. "The subject of the film is a second chance for love," says one of the producers. Anyone watching the advertisement for the film on TV will have a hard time noticing that the plot takes place on a space station.
"Solaris" is based on two sources, on the book by the science fiction writer Stanislav Lem from 1961 and the film by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky from 1972. Both are called "Solaris", and both serve as a fascinating subtext that works against Soderbergh's film. All three versions share basic plot lines, but the ending is very different and the elusive meaning hidden in the story is even more different.
Stanislaw Lem was born in 1921 and continues to live and write in Krakow, Poland. Tarkovsky died in 1986. "Solaris", in all its three incarnations, is the story of an astronaut-psychologist named Chris Calvin, who goes to the space station orbiting the sea star Solaris, after getting the impression that something strange is happening there. Arriving at the station, Calvin discovers that the crew chief has committed suicide and the two remaining crew members are behaving in an extremely strange manner.
It turns out that each member of the team has a "visitor", who in some way embodies a basic wish, dream or fear. Calvin's visitor soon arrives as well, in the form of his dead wife, Rhea. On Earth, Raya sank into depression and committed suicide. When it dawns on her that she is not completely real, the "visiting" Raya is also attacked by worry and confusion.
At the end of the book, Calvin takes a cruise ship from the station, lands on an island, sits on the beach and watches in amazement at the spur of a sea wave swirling hesitantly around his palm. The last sentence in the book is: "I knew nothing, and I clung to the belief that the age of cruel miracles had not yet passed from the world." They say that it took Lam an entire year to decide how the book would end.
Tarkovsky opens his film with scenes set on Earth, where Calvin is seen spinning in his father's vacation home. At the end of the film, after Calvin sinks into delusions, the film returns to the same place. Calvin kneels before his father in the pouring rain and the camera zooms out to reveal that the house stands on an island in an endless ocean, on the alien planet.
Soderbergh, who also wrote the screenplay, leaves Tarkovsky's rain images on Earth, but for him they focus on Calvin and Raya's relationship. At the end of it, it becomes clear to Calvin that he has the power to regenerate himself like all the other "visitors". Raya reappears, strong and aware, and now they open to the perfect eternal love that was not given to them on earth.
Do these differences matter? Is one version "better" than its predecessor? Soderbergh and James Cameron, who is one of the partners in the production (alongside Fox International), want to present Lem's book as a kind of blot on the Rorschach test, open to 100 interpretations, each of which is legitimate. Soderbergh says that in his youth he knew Tarkovsky's film and also read the book, and always saw them as a love story.
One can accuse the book and the first movie of a romantic conception of the sacrificing woman: the woman dies to save the husband, her role is to "redeem" the hero. In the new film, Natasha McLaughlin presents a stronger character opposite Calvin, played by George Clooney. At first she too appears as a sacrificial figure, but her muscular arms and her control at the end, where she appears as a know-it-all, suggest a much more active force.
The book and the first film convey the story through layers of literature and mythology: Orpheus searching for his Eurydice, Goethe's Faust, Don Quixote, Tolstoy, Surrealism, Kafka and Bruegel - they all flash for moments. Soderbergh, who describes himself as an "optimistic atheist", approaches the story with completely different tools.
Another issue is the translation of literary descriptions into cinematic images. In Solaris York's Lem the Ocean spits out amazingly ornate structures and forms that rise and disappear from the surface of the sea like the flames of the sun, and many pages are devoted to descriptions of fantastic forms in the tone of visions of the apocalypse.
Mosfilm studios, where Tarkovsky had to work, on a low budget, could not cope with the attempt to embody such descriptions in pictures. Soderbergh does not reproduce Lem's descriptions either, but he creates his own world of spatial images, simpler, more abstract and extremely beautiful. Cameron - the director of "Terminator" and "Titanic" - was mainly interested in the ability of modern technology to create images that would inspire Lem's prose. About 47 million dollars were invested in the production of the new "Solaris".
Tarkovsky's "Solaris" has been described, among other things, as the Russian answer to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey". Soderbergh's Solaris may be a more suitable candidate for the role. "I always thought of this planet as a counterpart to the monolith in 'Odyssey,'" he says. "I think that 2001 is one of the most important works of an American director. No person who deals with cinema and has seen this film can't help but be influenced by it."
However, despite the compelling look of the space station in Soderbergh's film and the beauty of the star Solaris, Cameron says that the director "isn't really interested in that side of the production." "In his eyes, it's like a play with five characters. He is interested in his psychological and spiritual issues," says Cameron.
"Both Tarkovsky's book and film addressed things that I have dealt with in all my films," says Soderbergh. "Guilt, loss, connection and lack of connection, the impossibility of knowing another person as you know yourself". Tarkovsky had already begun to shift the emphasis of "Solaris" from the conceptual level to the themes of love and relationships between people. Love also exists in Lem, but his real interest is in man's aspiration to connect with the outside world, an aspiration doomed to failure.
Soderbergh is also looking for the human, but he has no illusions: it is quite clear to him that Stanislav Lem, who fought with Tarkovsky over every tiny change in the plot and about giving body and shape to his ideas, and all his life fought with Hollywood and attacked its degeneration, would find no object in his version. "I hope he will be in good health when he watches the movie," says Soderbergh.
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~397669992~~~73&SiteName=hayadan
