Reality gets twisted up in outer space in Andrei Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS
SOLARIS (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, June 22, free with museum admission of $12, 2:00
Series continues through July 12
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the Russian 2001: A Space Odyssey, Natalya Bondarchuk and Donatus Banionis star as a different kind of couple caught up in something very strange that is going on in outer space, unexplainable to both the characters in the film and the people in the audience. Banionis plays Dr. Kris Kelvin, a psychologist who is sent to the Solaris space station to decide whether to put an end to the solaristics project that Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) complicated twenty years before. What he discovers is one death, two possibly insane men, and his supposedly dead wife (Bondarchuk). Ambiguity reigns supreme in this gorgeously shot (in color and black-and-white by cinematographer Vadim Yusov) and scored (by Eduard Artemyev) film that, while technically science fiction, is really about the human conscience, another gem from master Russian director Tarkovsky (Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Nostalghia). See it whether or not you’ve checked out Steven Soderbergh’s underrated remake with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. Based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Solaris is screening June 22 at 2:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! Science Fiction (Part Two)” series, which continues through July 12 with such other sci-fi flicks as Alain Resnais’s Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime, Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running and Brainstorm in 70mm, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, also in 70mm