Geoff Dyer - Zona - A Book About a Film about a Journey to a Room

8Rerberg’s alleged drinking and womanizing were contribu tory reasons for his getting sacked from the film; Rerberg doesn’t deny this, though he does suggest that, as far as drinking goes, he was just keeping up with the director. Certainly, drinking on set was a widespread problem, especially during the periods when something went wrong (something was always going wrong) and there was nothing to do but wait for it to be sorted out. A snowstorm in June threatened to shut down the production completely. Then Tarkovsky announced, out of the blue, that shooting would begin again at seven in the morning. Sound engineer Vladimir Sharun went to Solonitsyn’s room to let him know and found the actor and his makeup man ‘totally out of it.’ The makeup man immediately asked for three kilograms of potatoes so that the peel could be applied to Solonitsyn’s face and reduce the swelling caused by ‘the two-week binge.’ (Not two days, two weeks.) The potatoes were procured and the potion mixed. Sharun returned to Solonitsyn’s room to find the makeup man flat on his back, and the star applying this peasant version of a Kiehl’s product to his face.

9A sentiment shared by many men on this thirsty earth of ours. When I was a boy my dad would come home from work, after the summer holidays, full of disgust for his workmates, who had been on holiday somewhere and had spent the entire time at the bar or round a swimming pool, drinking, either in Spain or some other place where the licensing laws were not as repressive as in England. That was their deepest desire and wish. We rarely went anywhere on holiday because my dad’s deepest desire was always to save money and the best place to do this, to avoid the temptations of knickerbocker glories and overpriced choc-ices, was not to leave our home, the room where money came in, very slowly, but left even more reluctantly. (I am aware that this is not the first time that I have referred in print to my dad’s fear of the overpriced chocice. Albert Camus believed that ‘a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’ This certainly seems true of Tarkovsky, especially in Mirror. In my case, it seems that one of these images is a chocice and my dad reluctantly forking out for it. I am being unfair, or at least am referring to chocices in overpriced holiday destinations such as Bournemouth or Weston-super-Mare. My father had a friend who worked at the local Walls factory, in Gloucester, who was able to get chocices cheap. I asked him once if these chocices were stolen — hot, as they say in America. ‘It’s a perk,’ my dad said with a look of immense inward satisfaction.)

10I had intended breaking this little book into 142 sections — each separated from the one preceding and following it by a double space — corresponding to the 142 shots of the film. That’s a very low number of shots for a long film and it worked well at first but then, as I became engrossed and re-engrossed in the film, I kept losing track of where one shot ended and another began. This forgetting or not noticing is an authentic and integral part of watching any film — and this book is an account of watchings, rememberings, misrememberings, and forgettings; it is not the record of a dissection.

11We can’t actually see what time it is. If we could, then part of this scene might have found its way into Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), a video montage of moments of glimpsed time grabbed from thousands of films. The Clock lasts twenty-four hours and is synched precisely so that every minute of screen time — as revealed by clocks, watches or dialogue — is exactly the same as the local time of wherever the film is being screened. Tarkovsky expressed distaste for ‘montage cinema’, but Marclay’s sampled narrative is like an extrapolation of many of the points he makes in the ‘Time, rhythm and editing’ section of Sculpting in Time. (Actually, it’s possible that this moment of Stalker glancing at his wife’s watch is in The Clock somewhere — I’ve only seen about ten hours of the whole thing — floating free of the relentless anchoring of verifiable time as a kind of gestural filler. For the record, I did spot a few bits from Nostalghia and Solaris.)

12Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 version is obviously and consciously a sci-fi film set in the sci-future. He claimed his film was not a remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris but a refilming of the Stanislaw Lem novel on which Tarkovsky’s film was based. There was certainly scope for this as far as Lem was concerned; in his opinion, Tarkovsky ‘did not make Solaris; what he made was Crime and Punishment.’ Still, in the very first shot of Soderbergh’s film (raindrops on a windowpane, olive green and beigey brown) it’s obvious that memories of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (specifically the transitional shot near the end, taking us back from the space station to earth, of a plant on Kris’s brown-beige window sill) are intent on coming (and are intended to come) back to haunt us. The film is a lot better than Tarkovsky loyalists might care to admit and George Clooney is good as always, even though he looks, as usual, like he’s starring in a (futuristic) advert for George Clooney. The most interesting thing about it, from my point of view, was that from the start Natascha McElhone looked rather like my wife. After a while this became so striking that I whispered to my wife, ‘She looks incredibly like you.’ ‘I know,’ my wife whispered back. This resemblance deepened as the film continued. With every subsequent death and reincarnation of her character, Natascha McElhone came to resemble my wife more and more closely until, about halfway through, it was exactly like watching my wife up there onscreen, constantly getting killed off and constantly coming back with more devotion and more love. Although I was deluded in thinking that it was my wife on-screen, this delusion was encouraged by the film to the extent that I was more deeply implicated in the on-screen drama than I had ever been before. Just as writers sometimes speak of an ideal reader, so, in a way, I was Soderbergh’s ideal viewer. There I was, sitting thinking, ‘My god, it’s my wife’, and there was Clooney being told, ‘That’s not your wife.’ She kept reappearing as he wanted her to be, as he remembered her, as he wrongly remembered her. Star and viewer — Clooney and I! — were suffering from the same delusion. This was not vanity on my part, and the delusion was not all-enveloping: I wasn’t sitting there thinking I’m married to Natascha McElhone, therefore I’m George fucking Clooney. But I wasn’t — we weren’t — alone in thinking that my wife looked incredibly like Natascha McElhone. We once went to a wedding in the Adirondacks where a fellow guest sidled up to my wife and said, ‘I’ve been wondering all weekend if you’re really Natascha McElhone.’ At least two other people made similar observations in the years immediately following the film’s release. We watched Solaris again a few days ago, only to discover, predictably enough, that my wife no longer looks like Natascha McElhone in Solaris —but then neither does Natascha McElhone. We were sitting near her at a lavish fund-raiser for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2010 and although we did not chat we were able to have a discreetly good gawp. Natascha McElhone and my wife have both changed, but have changed differently — in the same direction (they’re older) but in slightly different ways. It doesn’t matter. In the film Natascha McElhone is as she is because that’s how George Clooney remembers her and she looks like my wife because that is how I remember her. Only the film preserves that memory of how alike they were, more alike than the two films of the same book.