SOLARIS

1. French-language Canadian magazine. CANADA; Luc POMERLEAU; Daniel SERNINE. 2. Russian film (1971). Mosfilm. Dir Andrei TARKOVSKY, starring Donatas Banionis, Natalia Bondarchuk, Youri Jarvet, Anatoli Solinitsin. Screenplay Tarkovsky, Friedrich Gorenstein, based on SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970) by Stanislaw LEM. 165 mins; first US version 132 mins. Colour.

   This long, ambitious rendering of Lem's metaphysical novel is regarded by some as one of the finest sf films made; a minority sees it as tediously slow-moving. S changes the emphasis of the story from the intellectual to the emotional, partly by restructuring the narrative, which in the film is framed by elegiac and nostalgic sequences at the country house of the young space-scientist hero's parents, focusing on the scientist's relationship with his father; the opening passage is on Earth, the closing passage on Solaris's recreation of Earth. The main action is set on a space-station hovering above the planet Solaris, whose ever-changing ocean is thought to be organic and sentient. The protagonist finds the station in disrepair and his colleagues demoralized by the materialization of "phantoms" (quite real and solid) of their innermost obsessions; soon heis himself haunted by a reincarnation of his suicided wife. These phantoms may be an attempt by Solaris to communicate. Horrified, he kills the phantom wife, but a replica arrives that night. Ultimately he recognizes that, no matter what her source, she is both living and lovable; but while he sleeps she connives at her own exorcism. Solaris remains an enigma. The philosophical questions about the limits of human understanding are not put so sharply as in the book, but the visual images, despite occasionally mediocre special effects, are potent - haunting leitmotivs of water, sundering screens, technology and snow.

   PN

   See also: MUSIC; RUSSIA; SPACE HABITATS.