Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972
"All these heartbreaking lamentations are nothing but second-rate Dostoyevsky."
How can you not love a movie with a line like that? But this must be a place for honesty, and I have to tell you that Tarkovsky might have finally gotten a little too meditative for me. I had to restart this movie five times because I kept falling asleep. I think this had more to do with when as opposed what I was watching, but I wanted to give you all the facts.
My preconceived notions (which are proving remarkably persistent of late) of this film were informed by Soderbergh's remake. I haven't seen it (Do I want to?) but I have a very distinct memory of the poster, basically a beautiful blown-up photo of Clooney and Natascha McElhone kissing. And of course we expect the prospect of reunion with a departed love to feel romantic, overlooking the reality that it can prove deeply troubling and disturbing. Here, when Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) first sees the manifestation of his dead wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), he freaks out and sends the "guest" out into space. Here this "second chance" does not offer a blissful idyll beyond the parameters of a flawed human relationship, but a kind of eternal, repetitive return to all the trauma and pain associated with that relationship on Earth.
In an interesting twist, the film focuses less on the interiority of the one who lived than on the metaphysical struggles of his "guest." She goes through some heavy shit here -- How and why was I born? Who am I, if I both am and am not the person you love? Do you really love me, or just the memory or idea of me, or do you just feel obligated to me because the me who is not me committed suicide? -- and Bondarchuk displays the wonderfully wise sadness tinged with the knowledge she can never fully deliver. You can read it as an allegory for a few different things -- men's unreasonable expectations of women and women's struggles to achieve an authentic definition in the face of those expectations, or the lover's unreasonable expectations of the beloved.
As part of the ongoing Tarkovsky Watch (more to come!), this film definitely gave me a deeper sense of his visual style. A recurring motif seems to be shots, like the one that opens this film, of weeds moving underwater, and it occurred to me that this could function as a metaphor for the notions of space and time conveyed by Tarkovsky's use of camera movement, but I couldn't completely connect the dots. Camera movement works here much as it does in I Am Love, to create a palpable sense of anticipation and suspense, to echo Snaut's dire prediction "This will end badly." When the camera pans over the Breugel reproductions, I was immediately reminded of the epic scenes of Andrei Rublev. In an interesting moment, we see the simulated Hari gazing at the paintings. For Kelvin and the astronauts, this painting represents a rural pastoral that they have no firsthand knowledge of, but nevertheless reminds them of home. But when Hari looks at this, what does she see? Does the fact that she's human-generated means that it's familiar to her, or is she just looking at a foreign planet?
Tarkovsky has a real eye for photographing nature: the shots of Kelvin's father's house take your breath away. This sets up an obvious but powerful contrast between the warmth of Earth and the sterile cool of space and paves the way for the assertion, articulated by Snaut, that space exploration actually proves quite traumatizing and humans only really need other humans.
Comments