Watched: Solaris, In the Dust of the Stars, Stalker
ATTACK THE BLOC kicked off at the Lightbox this week, the first strike in TIFF’s roaring winter season, which Matty Price* rightly described as being programmed as if they were wondering if anyone was looking. Sasha and I scampered down to the BLB after the Haywire sneak on Thursday night to kick things off rightly with Solaris, which was a goddamned lead-lined prison of a movie for the middle of winter, but I’m glad I at least have seen it now, and can cross its Criterion release off my wish list for ever.
No, I didn’t enjoy it much. “Half the time and twice as well” is becoming my favourite compliment in moviegoing, which I suppose means I’m starting to like 90 minute movies a lot more than 160 minute movies. (Matty Price** first fired the missive at Valhalla Rising, in reference to its relationship to The New World.) Now I’ve circled back around on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, having first seen, and first disliked, and then really liked, Soderbergh’s remake. There’s no way around it: Soderbergh did it in half the time and twice as well. Not a very “cultured important film criticism” type opinion, but there you go. Seeing Solaris made me dread seeing Stalker on Saturday - and I do need to catch up with Nostalghia as well, regardless - though at least when this Tarkovsky-digging is done, I can justifiably say I never need to do it again!***
At 95 minutes to Solaris’ 166, In the Dust of the Stars at least promised brevity; yet somehow managed to seem longer than the opening night film. Sometimes shitty is just shitty, plus I had Mystery Science Theatre 3000 happening to my left and non-stop high-pitched giggling immediately behind me. It was hard to fight through the thoughts of murder.
There’s an amusing enough party/orgy scene early in the film in which the intrepid cosmonauts are welcomed to an alien planet with a shindig that would have had Jim Kirk and Will Riker tearing off their tunics and gang-fucking the locals while drinking blood-red brandy. The aliens are described as “gay and a little crazy,” but with mind control; and there are nude impressionist shadow dances and a lot of musical numbers, and the Boss’ magical rainbow zither machine, all of which should have entertained the shit out of me – but holy lord, In The Dust of the Stars is monotonous. The film did make me wonder, though, why so many science fiction infrastructures of the ‘60s and ‘70s took the cosmos as a neverending series of swinger pads – and, more pertinently, why no one does any more. (It’s a long way from the red leather leisure suits and roofie drugs of the party in In the Dust of the Stars to the chaste questions of Na’vi tail-twining in Avatar.) When did space cease to be a sexual frontier? (When everything else did, I suppose.)
In welcome opposition to Solaris, Tarkovsky’s Stalker fascinated me. It was a challenging climb, but three hours’ effort to arrive at a final shot that badass – the stalker’s daughter, child of the Zone, moves three glasses across a table using her mind, after a whole film in which the supernatural intrudes only in conversation, never in evidence – is well worth it. Similarly, an earlier shot, right at the climax of the film, finds our three utilitarian men – Writer, Professor, and Stalker – collapsed at the door of the Room, towards which they have been heading throughout the film; they do not enter it, but the camera does, holding its gaze upon them as it glides silently over a pool of still water, which is then interrupted by a sunshower, and just as quickly returns to stillness.
“The Zone is a very complex maze of traps,” Stalker intones as he leads Writer and Professor towards the Room, which is meant to fulfill one’s most secret and cherished desire – not “the thing you want the most,” per most genies in most bottles, but rather a manifestation of your true self made real, echoing Solaris. When they come to it, the men find it difficult to confront the consequences of knowing themselves so truly. (Is the Room the room from The Room? Let’s ponder that one.)
The film is extraordinary to look at; and being a 3-hour tone poem of silences and held pauses, that’s what one spends most of one’s time doing while watching it, I suppose. The opening stanza in sepia-and-white, a post-apocalyptic world of broken concrete and rail lines, gives way to the faded colour photography of the Zone, which Attack the Bloc programmer Todd Brown told us was not intentional, but rather the result of expired film stock foisted upon Tarkovsky by a distrusting studio. Intentional or no, the “flashing” effect of the damaged film turns Stalker into a landscape of mist and calm water; a sublime, supple dreamscape of microscopic colour gradations and depth of light and shadow. Take that, Russia!
Of my regrets in life, not taking Evan William Cameron’s fourth year theory class at York – “Four Thinkers: Bresson, Dreyer, Ozu and Tarkovsky****” – ranks surprisingly highly. I just didn’t have the balls. I was scared to death of Cameron, to say nothing of Bresson, Dreyer, Ozu, Tarkovsky, and my ability to analyze them meaningfully. Who knows what I would have made of the class, had I pulled the trigger and actually taken it. But I think about it constantly. Am I the Fifth Thinker?
*not his real name
**still not his real name
***it must be made clear that I do not, of course, begrudge the opportunity to see Attack The Bloc at all. I am thrilled to bits that this programme exists, that I live in the same city as the Lightbox, and that I get to go and see these movies on a big screen. The richness of all this, the extraordinary privilege of it, never escapes far from my thoughts.
****not sure if this is actually the Four Thinkers, or the order they Thought in.
Watched is a regular blog series catch-all of non-reviews of films I see in any given week. It posts on Mondays, though not every Monday.
