It's not every day that a big Hollywood star and one of its hottest directors remake a Soviet metaphysical masterpiece of the 1970s. Solaris, starring George Clooney, directed by Stephen Soderbergh and adapted from Andrei Tarkovsky's film of the same name, has opened in the US to neither highbrow nor lowbrow acclaim. The film's final reel in particular has been the subject of much head scratching, as it's sort of a happy ending but sort of not.
Solaris will no doubt be equally scrutinised when it opens here in January, but the ambiguity of its ending raises broader questions. The biggest box office hits in Soviet and Russian cinema have always been tragedies, yet when they are shown in the US, they often have tagged-on happy endings. Nothing surprising in that, you might say. US cinema has conquered the world by being feelgood. Look at Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, a splendid work of digital-gothic, ruined in its closing moments when Tom Cruise touches his pregnant wife's stomach.
In fact, the history of US cinema's optimism is more complex than this suggests. The American film noirs which influenced Minority Report were visually and tonally dark. Gone with the Wind has a very unhappy ending. Titanic, the biggest US box office hit of all time, is a tragedy (of sorts). Within a few years of Tarkovsky's original Solaris, Martin Scorsese made an equally bleak anti-musical-New York, New York-whose centrepiece was an exuberant dance routine called "Happy Endings"-a homage to Judy Garland production numbers of the 1940s and 1950s. In an astonishing sign of the film world's 1970s ambivalence about utopia, "Happy Endings" was cut from the film. The spirit of Judy Garland, it seemed, would not wash.
In the same year, 1977, Woody Allen's Annie Hall carried the ironic line, "In the movies you should try to have happy endings, because life so rarely does." Polanski was closer to the spirit of the times when he had Faye Dunaway, the innocent victim in Chinatown, shot through the eye at the end of the film.
Last scenes are so crucial in America that some stock market speculators judge the US mood by the prevailing endings of big movies. But what's even more remarkable is the influence of Russian film, working across a great cultural divide, on the cult of the ending. There are happy endings in Soviet and Russian films too, of course, but, unlike America, tragedy has always been the norm. The obvious reason is that Russia had an infernal 20th century. Yet in other countries, cinema lightens as history darkens. Betty Grable songs were the biggest thing in the west during the second world war. US cinema got jollier as the depression deepened. China went through as much as Russia, yet its movies rarely end in so many tears.
It would be easy to pontificate on the bottomless soul of Mother Russia. Yet neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky were notably more miserable than French or German novelists of the 19th century. No other major filmmaking nation, with the possible exception of Sweden, supports the argument that sombre literature begets sombre cinema. Even Satyajit Ray's adaptations of Rabindranath Tagore-the most serious Indian films ever made-pull their punches at the end, leaving open the possibility of hope.
Russia's special brand of cinematic gloom may owe something to the fact that when it entered the first world war in 1914, its borders were closed and no international films were shown. The revolution was three years away, but in this short period, Russian directors started to evolve a unique tone. Tsarist era filmmakers like Evgenii Bauer and Yakov Protazanov made a string of great, sombre movies which have only recently been rediscovered. Bauer directed a scarcely believable 80 films between 1913 and 1917, when he died of pneumonia. With titles like After Death, A Life for a Life and The Dying Swan (in which an artist strangles a ballerina as soon as she falls in love with him) Bauer explored questions of how fate and natural forces foil human desire. Such films were hugely popular.
And just as Russian cinema was cooking on its melancholic gas, a group of US songwriters started to put pen to paper. The work of these men would become the manifesto of Hollywood utopianism. Irving Berlin had his first worldwide hit with "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911 and after the jazz age he penned classics such as "Blue Skies," "There's No Business Like Show Business," and "God Bless America" for songbirds like Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, Eddie Cantor and Fred Astaire. While "There's No Business Like Show Business," with its chin up, keep-smiling-through message, became a national anthem of hope, Yip Harburg was writing "Over the Rainbow," a leftist ballad about self improvement which anchored The Wizard of Oz. Similarly, Al Dubin wrote the lyrics for 42nd Street, which became cinema's archetypal story of the chorus girl getting a big break and becoming a star.
The songs and themes of Berlin, Harburg and Dubin turned sound cinema into the most optimistic cultural industry anywhere in the world, and in doing so gave America a signature. That signature has become blurred at times and even today filmmakers find it oppressive. But here's the real puzzle about happy endings. Berlin, Harburg and Dubin were all Russians.
