11/01/2025
« Les autorités soviétiques voulaient leur propre année 2001 : une odyssée de l'espace. Tarkovsky voulait autre chose. « Je ne suis pas intéressé par l'espace, » a-t-il déclaré. « Je m'intéresse à l'espace intérieur du cœur humain. ”
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Le film a été confronté à d'interminables batailles de censure. Les responsables soviétiques l'ont appelé « trop mystique » et « trop lent. ” Tarkovski a refusé de couper son rythme méditatif ou de faire taire ses subtensions spirituelles. « Ils voulaient des fusées, » a-t-il dit, « et je leur ai donné des larmes. ”»
When Solaris (1972) was being filmed, Andrei Tarkovsky wasn’t just making a science fiction movie — he was fighting for the soul of human emotion in a genre obsessed with machines. The Soviet authorities wanted their own 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tarkovsky wanted something else entirely. “I am not interested in outer space,” he said. “I am interested in the inner space of the human heart.”
Filming was emotionally grueling. The story of a man haunted by his dead wife aboard a living planet became, for Tarkovsky, an exploration of memory, guilt, and love. Actor Donatas Banionis, who played Kris Kelvin, later admitted, “Sometimes I couldn’t tell if we were filming a scene or confessing our sins.”
During one key scene — where Kelvin’s wife, reborn by Solaris, pleads to be destroyed — Tarkovsky broke down on set. Crew members remembered him whispering, “Love that cannot die is the heaviest burden.” The actress, Natalya Bondarchuk, was deeply shaken. She said, “He wanted us to play pain as something sacred.”
The film faced endless censorship battles. Soviet officials called it “too mystical” and “too slow.” Tarkovsky refused to cut its meditative pacing or silence its spiritual undertones. “They wanted rockets,” he said, “and I gave them tears.”
When Solaris finally premiered, audiences sat in stunned silence. It wasn’t a film about space — it was about loneliness, forgiveness, and the desperate human need to be understood.
Tarkovsky’s masterpiece dared to say what few sci-fi films ever had: that no matter how far we travel, the greatest mystery we face is still within ourselves.
