Cinema
Spaced out
Christopher Hudson
Space exploration in the cinema has suffered the same sort of transformation as the Western.
Just as palefaces have left off kill ing Indians to moralise about ra cial equality, our cultural and eth nic heritage and the conservation
of the Californian redwood, so astronauts now disown science, turn their backs on all the technical lumber that's been a staple of the genre since Wiles, and peer out of plexiglass portholes at the mystery and beauty of the universe. Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, an exceptionally intelligent piece of science fiction now diffused into an interesting, overlong film (two and threequarter hours) by Andrei Tarkovsky (' AA ' Curzon), is about precisely this. For a hundred years or more, scientists have been compiling information about Solaris, a distant planet entirely covered by an ocean of viscous liquids in which islands of solid matter form and disappear. They can't co-ordinate their statistics, nor can they establish contact with the intelligence behind the ocean's patterns. After garbled reports from the circling space station, a hardheaded psychologist, Kris Kelvin, is sent to investigate. Of the three men on board, the captain is dead and the other two scientists uncommunicative. The ship seems to be haunted. Kelvin catches glimpses of a dwarf, and a girl in a nightdress, and then his dead wife Hari appears in his room.
But these me no ordinary ghosts. The blind intelligence of Solaris has battened on the scientists' memory and incarnated the pictures closest to their conscience. Hari is merely the template of Kelvin's real wife, but close enough to flesh-and-blood (except that she is almost indestructible) for Kelvin to fall in love with her again. And thereby, in accepting the existence of unreality, or of an alternative reality, Kelvin is forced to accept that Solaris itself may incorporate truths and purposes unsusceptible to scientific investigation.
Tarkovsky's film, beautiful though it is, has neither the simplicity nor the depth of the novel. The message is clear: man can find beauty and harmony on earth without travelling through space towards unattainable goals, and the mysteries of life and death, love and happiness are greater than any objective truth that may proceed from their scientific investigation. But Tarkovsky has romanticised Solaris at the expense of Russian technology — which may be one reason why the film has taken so long to reach us.
The only credit in Something to Hide (' AA ' Marble Arch Odeon) must go to Michael Klinger for managing to persuade Peter Finch, Shelley Winters and Cohn .pec-Lator May 5, 1973 p8lakIlY that he had an idea for a o film. Shelley Winters comes {?1 best; her blowsy, neurotic 0Lisevvife alternating between sc,reaming rages and alcoholic c'eif-pity is now her easiest, most :atniliar role. Blakely, too, is conn'ent to saunter through a minor as publicity director of an Isle " wight town council. But Finch rtlarried to the one and working rc)r the other) struggles pitiably to ,ecue a credible character out of 'Farcical plot. wThe character is Harry Field. ? see him quarrelling with his ite and then, lo and behold, he is
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on the Southampton road, ri,e,'tirig up a pregnant girl hitch:!Itcer (an appropriately repulsdive performance by Linda Hay Who preys on his goodwill 143ret,u sense of duty to get herself a for the night, for several .Igits, in his seaside house. (The nWilf,e, you understand, has va
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Oned overseas.) The baby s and smothered by the girl then disappears. Harry Field burns the tiny corpse in his greenUse incinerator. When a pasking ice-cream salesman puts the al copper on his trail, Harry ,i'`.411S amok with a gun, thereby Lisclosing that his wife isn't 'road but lies dead and buried under a nearby beach. [3,4Low did they find out about the you fairly ask. Don't underr;titnate the profound seriousness In this meaningful film. " You see, was at Auschwitz," the icei"„reatn salesman tells Harry, laya trembling hand on his knee. ' smelt the smoke."
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