On the commentary track on the dvd the director Steven Soderbergh talks about what he calls "pure cinema." I get what he means, but it's more difficult to explain than it would seem. It's not simply image driven narrative, nor is it a movie where people don't talk as much. The best term I can come up with is "visual poetry." I consider it a form of rythmic moviemaking, where tone, time, and space search for some sort of harmony. It's a cumulative effect, more than the sum of its parts.
This is considerably different from, say, Tarkovsky (who made the original Solaris, who attempted to hold shots as long as possible in a search for eternity in a transient art form). This is post-MTV cinema.
This style, also seen in In the Mood for Love, Beau Travail, and Molhalland Drive, is particulary suited to a story like Solaris, where characters are caught in their own emotional traps, outside space and time. It's appropriate then that when Clooney rejects the clone of his dead lover, it happens before he rejects her in the past, in real life. The mistakes he makes are curiously predestined, a type of orginal sin, if you will.
The final moments, then, make perfect sense for a movie so completely confined to the psyches of its characters. What is imagination for, if not for dreams of redemption? What then are the movies for?
No comments:
Post a Comment