Keeper of the flame

The second scene of Nostalghia (1983), Andrei Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, offers us a broad view of a road weaving through a misty Italian countryside. A car enters the frame, exits the frame, and, some moments later, enters again; a woman and a man exit the car and move into the landscape, those cottony spectres of mist. The scene is conveyed in a single unbroken shot—no other director in history is so closely associated with extended shot duration as Tarkovsky. It is entrancing and beautiful, but also indicative of this film’s general air. Nearly everything that departs returns, while characters move through a fog that increasingly blurs present-tense reality from dreams of things lost.

Kino released Nostalghia on DVD and BD earlier this year, prompting a handful of critical reconsiderations of this, one of two films from the less-admired exile period in the oeuvre of the Russian director, who died in 1986. But anyone who watches any Tarkovsky film more than once knows well the way his films have of shifting with every visit—or even within a single viewing. How many times have I struggled with some aspect of these unusually personal, sensual, meandering, philosophy-smacked, sometimes downright cryptic films, only to reach the end and feel redeemed by their exalted, breath-taking visions and uncanny ability to find poetic closure? Cinema as travel: I’ve yet to encounter a Tarkovsky film that hasn’t left me feeling as though I’ve been transported, been through something.

Tarkovsky had certainly been through something by the time of Nostalghia’s release. He wouldn’t have had an easy time making his films in any country, but his frustrations with the micromanaging Soviet industry were particular and many, to the point where working abroad could mean permanent separation from his family. He’d been thinking of making a film in Italy since the mid-70s, and the project came about in part through his friendship and collaboration with Tonino Guerra, Antonioni’s regular co-scenarist. Yet Nostalghia is anything but a radical departure from the themes or MO of Tarkovsky’s previous films. As the title suggests, it is soaked in longing for the past, as well as apocalyptic sentiments about the present.

The story, such as it is, concerns a homesick Russian writer in Italy to research the life of a Russian composer who once lived there and suicide upon returning home. The writer travels with a young interpreter, a Renaissance beauty whose allure he seems to be working to resist, perhaps because of the wife waiting back home, perhaps because of some general contempt he feels toward a spiritually bankrupt West. Enter Domenico (Bergman regular Erland Josephson, oddly cast but completely captivating), a local lunatic in the soggy Tuscan village where the writer wanders. Domenico claims that if he could just manage to cross St. Catherine’s Pool with a lit candle he could save the world. Nostalghia’s dramatic climax finds Domenico atop a statue in a public square, ranting about the world’s slide into perdition before immolating himself in front of a scattering of impassive onlookers. From fiery spectacle to one tiny precious flame: Tarkovsky cuts from Domenico’s flailing to the writer attempting the ostensible world-saving traversal Domenico hadn’t managed. Then comes the film’s final and most emblematic image: the writer seated before a Russian dacha that, impossibly, is nestled in the ruins of a colossal Italian cathedral—an image explicitly echoes the final image of Solaris (1973). A happy ending? It seems so to me. A reconciliation of past and present, cinema magic as a way of allowing both to exist simultaneously.

There are things that irk me in Nostalghia, like the writer’s condescension and somewhat insufferable gloominess—the guy could almost be an Antonioni protagonist—and Tarkovsky’s tendency to reduce women to symbols. Yet the sense of dream and memory’s hold on our psyche infuses the film with a watery soul-hauntedness that will stay with you forever. 

                     

Ocean memory mirror: Solaris on blu-ray

Andrei Tarkovsky’s is very much a wet cinema, and Solaris (1972), his first foray into science fiction, newly available on blu-ray from Criterion, represents his densest and most haunting use of water, not only as an elemental motif, but as a fundamental narrative resource. Inspired by (though far from beholden to) the novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris finds its baffled protagonist, a psychologist of clinical demeanor named Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), on a space station hovering over the oceanic surface of the eponymous distant planet, a planet that seems to be delivering to its visitors resurrected figures from their past. The waters of Solaris are a source of life, or rather deathlessness. Kris is visited and revisited by his wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), who suicided some ten years ago. Her memories are initially so miniscule that she’s even surprised by her own face in the mirror, but very quickly the old/original Hari’s memories accumulate. At first Kris tries to get rid of her, but she just comes back. Like the lovers of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Kris and Hari appear to be condemned to (or blessed with) a closed circuit of eternal return, at least for as long as Kris stays within Solaris’ inscrutable orbit.

Solaris was my first Tarkovsky, and its lulling opening images of a pond and its undulating vegetation leave deep impressions on me still. That first half-hour or so, an earthbound prologue entirely absent from Lem’s book, set in and around Kris’ family’s dacha, impart a vital sense of Tarkovsky’s attachment to nature just before he launches his (and our) imagination into space. A sudden shower passes through the countryside as Kris wanders the dacha’s grounds, while the sun continues to beam down and cast objects in a dewy glow. Children play in the woods. A horse ambles around. Though a city of cold, teeming freeways lays somewhere nearby, though this seems to be a world made of men largely suffering in the absence of women, we get the impression that this is close enough to paradise—as close as we’ve any right to. Before Kris leaves on his mission he starts a small fire outside the dacha and begins burning piles of old research notes and personal items. In a sense he’s taking his memories and turning them into smoke and ash, yet these memories will soon be resurrected through the mysterious formative powers of Solaris’ oceans. The two scientists left on Solaris, already more than familiar with the phenomenon that will afflict the newcomer, suggest that these needy, tactile ghosts, or “guests,” as they refer to them, have “something to do with conscience.” Are they referring to guilt over decades-old wrongdoings or guilt over their more recent bombarding of the Solaris ocean with radiation, which they say prompted the first apparitions? There is also the suggestion, made not by the scientists so much as by Tarkovsky himself, that whether Solaris is explored further or simply abandoned, some trace of those who came to it will remain, perhaps as tiny islands upon which memories replay themselves over and over again.

Solaris features images and ideas that continue to alternately fascinate, frighten and move me. Tarkovsky’s trademark expansive tracking shots and elliptical storytelling only heighten the film’s potency. The only flaws that stick with me after seeing it again arise from Tarkovsky’s disinterest in the allure of outer space (could he not have done a little more with the journey to Solaris?) and from Banionis’ performance, which feels lacking or vague, occasionally coming off more as that of an actor at a loss as to what he’s to be doing than it does as that of a character tormented by inexplicable events and a resurgence of dormant emotions. (Still, Banionis has the sort of face that rewards lingering shots, and looks kind of great while stumbling around the derelict space station in his underpants and monogrammed pajama top.) At one point a character echoes what were surely the sentiments of the film’s director when he says: “We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.” The enduring enigma and poetry of Tarkovsky’s work can be located in its capacity to hold up a mirror to the human soul and stir its murkiest existential questions, and in the curious case of Solaris, that mirror actually covers the surface of an entire world.

Lunatic fringe: Duncan Jones talks about sending Sam Rockwell straight to the Moon

We first catch sight of Sam Bell working the treadmill, pale and beardy as a muskrat, sporting a T-shirt that reads “Wake me when it’s quitting time.” Sam’s the sole human inhabitant on the lunar landscape, an on-site foreman and crew combo for a project that’s single-handedly rescuing Earth from its energy crisis by mining the local geology for deposits of solar power. (A clever gag has him grooving at one point to ‘Walkin’ on Sunshine.’) He’s on a three-year stint that’s nearly reached its terminus. The station is modern, at once buzzingly bright and cocoon-like, but also grimy with isolation, a disheveled bachelor pad more remote than the Unabomber’s. Other than occasional prerecorded messages beamed to him from his wife and toddler back home, the closest approximation to company is a boxy robot named GERTY, whose little screen offers a series of emoticons in lieu of facial expressions and converses with Sam in the not especially comforting tones of Kevin Spacey.

The loneliness is thick, the food all comes in baggies, and the night never ends. Moon is the antidote to space opera explosion movie. The frontiers it traipses upon are internal as much as extraterrestrial. Sam’s ostensibly gleeful last days on the moon are thwarted by an accident he has while driving his lunar land rover. He already seems to have been suffering from hallucinations before the crack-up, and now in his weakened, perhaps paranoid state things become only more confusing. Sam overhears potentially conspiratorial murmurings between GERTY and ground control, and he starts to see double—as in another Sam. Embodied by the wonderful, still underused Sam Rockwell in what is essentially a one-man show, Sam Bell begins to question all his assumptions about his life on the moon, his purpose there, and the very fabric of his perceived reality. If there was someone to form a union with, maybe he could go on strike. Then again, maybe there is someone…

Director and co-scenarist Duncan Jones cut his teeth making commercials, but it’s probably more pertinent that he studied philosophy before graduating from London Film School. Extrapolating on the work of Daniel Bennett and Peter Singer in applied ethics, Jones wrote an independent study thesis titled How to Kill Your Computer Friend: An Investigation of the Mind/Body Problem and How It Relates to the Hypothetical Creation of a Thinking Machine, which sounds very much like a dry-run for some of the ideas percolating in his feature debut. To be sure, it is ideas, and the emotional prompts they house, that imbue Moon with its richest features. The story itself may not seem fully propelled or resolved in any conventional sense, but the way revelations unfold—and, strangely enough, the way certain relationships develop—are what make this trip highly rewarding.

Moon director Duncan Jones

When I spoke with Jones he seemed energized, full of praise for Rockwell, and very friendly and easy to engage in discussion about all the notions and emotions lovingly poured into Moon. If he was slightly less enthused about discussing the fact that he’s the son of David Bowie, that’s pretty understandable, but I couldn’t resist asking one question. I think you’ll see why.

JB: For such an intimate film, Moon addresses an impressive number of contemporary anxieties. I’m thinking not only about environmental and genetic science concerns, but also about our dependency on telecommunications to verify our sense of what’s real and what isn’t. Did you set out to tap into these anxieties or did things just kind of turn out that way once you started fleshing out the premise?

Duncan Jones: The idea of long-distance relationships was very much a conscious one. My personal life at the time was burdened with a long-distance relationship and I wanted to channel that emotional material into the film. But the idea of social networking and using technology to communicate with people in a way that’s less direct that actually meeting them, that was more subconscious—though it’s something people seem to feel a real connection with.

JB: Your film caused me to reflect on how nostalgia-generative technology has become. We now have so many ways of archiving virtually every form of communication available to us. It’s as though we don’t necessarily have to nourish our relationships if we can get some morbid emotional fix by replaying their greatest hits.

DJ: Absolutely. I must admit that when I look through my own archive of emails I see an awful lot of old message from ex-girlfriends. We’re able now to sort of carry so much of our history around with us this way.

JB: I do the same thing. Makes me think of that Smog song where Bill Callahan sings about “getting off on the pornography of my past.”

DJ: [Laughs] That’s a great line!


JB: Another critical motif in Moon addresses the ways in which the culture is geared toward making absolutely everything disposable, including individuals.

DJ: Planned obsolescence, sure. That’s definitely there in the subtext. But in contrast to that, we also wanted to get across the value of humanity, how every individual counts—no matter how these individuals are brought into the world.

JB: Well, as I was watching Moon there was this knee-jerk part of me that was wondering who I was rooting for, only to realize that I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to any of the strange individuals who crop up.

DJ: And I think that’s how the characters end up feeling. They become like brothers, antagonistic but finally wanting to help each other.


JB: There’s a clever series of red herrings for sci-fi aficionados in Moon’s early scenes. You set a tone of comfortable familiarity by openly invoking such influential films as 2001 and Solaris, only to go in quite a different direction, particularly with the way you develop GERTY, the robot that so immediately recalls 2001’s HAL 9000 but whose own trajectory proves quite distinct. I wonder how you felt about the ostensible burden of influence one assumes when trying to make a thoughtful science fiction film.

DJ: Because I was so in love with those films the only burden I felt was to get it right. If I was going to pay homage I wanted it to be clear that I’d truly appreciated and absorbed the source material. We wanted to utilize these references to films we love, yet it was integral that we create something original, that we give the audience a new experience. What makes it work, I hope, is the personal stuff we brought into it, again, the long-distance relationship that I was going through, or the idea of meeting yourself and how would you get along. I’ve always been deeply intrigued by this thought experiment, by the question of whether or not I would like myself. If I met myself as a younger age, for example, I know that my younger self would have problems with me now, and I’m almost certain that me now would be frustrated by the younger me.

JB: I think this is also where science fiction can lead us back to older narrative archetypes, those involving doubles, this notion that a double is inherently suspicious, that there isn’t room enough for the two of us. Philip K. Dick was especially visionary in this regard. Were his books important to you either growing up or as you were developing Moon?

DJ: I was a huge Philip K. Dick fan growing up. I was also a big J.G. Ballard fan. His approach to taking what’s almost a contemporary setting and then adding a single little twist that turns it into science fiction is something I’ve always admired.

JB: And he had such a talent for crafting these utterly unsentimental tales that nevertheless provoke an intense emotional response.

DJ: It just breaks my heart that so many of his best works have already been optioned for films, because I’d love to do one!

JB: Before we run out of time I did have one inevitable dad question to ask.

DJ: Ah well, go on. You can have one.

JB: When we look back on your father’s breakthrough single from 40 years ago and compare it to Moon, there’s an intriguing symmetry of motifs: the lone man isolated in space, missing his wife, dependent on tenuous communication with the distant earth. Were you thinking about ‘Space Oddity’ at any point during the conception of Moon?

DJ: I totally understand the question and I know it might be impossible for people to believe, but I really wasn’t. It’s just a very strange piece of synchronicity. I was brought up by my dad, my parents having gotten divorced when I was very young, and I was probably surrounded by an awful lot of the same things that were interesting him when he was still roughly in that same creative period, so I’m sure it had a massive effect on me. But when I was writing Moon none of my dad’s work was what I was thinking about. It was my own personal situation, my wanting to work with Sam Rockwell, and talking about all these great science-fiction films from the 70s and 80s. That was really the root of it all. The rest just has to do with what planets you tend to orbit, I guess.