Reality gets twisted up in outer space in Andrei Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS
SOLARIS (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Friday, July 10, $10, 7:00
Series continues Friday nights through August 28
212-299-7777
madmuseum.org
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. See it whether or not you checked out Steven Soderbergh’s underrated remake with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. Based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Solaris, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, kicks off the Museum of Arts & Design film series “Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time,” which runs Friday nights from July 10 through August 28 and includes all seven of Tarkovsky’s masterpieces (Solaris, Stalker, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice) before concluding with the behind-the-scenes documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky, who died in 1986 at the age of fifty-four, was a superior craftsman whose cinematic oeuvre is filled with poetry and wonder, mystery and self-examination, exploring life and death, the past, the present, and the future, incorporating mesmerizing sound and visuals in telling complex stories like one else before or since.