The Mysterious Wall (1968) (Tainstvennaya stena)
IMDb metadata is runtime of 1 hour and 19 minutes, rated 6.6 by 120 cinemaistas.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Red
Verdict: Solaris before Solaris.
Tagline: It’s a wall! It’s a cloud! It’s a dome! It’s a mystery!
Opens with a vain TV host upstaging a panel of talking heads. So far so banal. The panelists don’t know anything but talk on. So far so usual. Could be on the ABC tonight, a poorly prepared journalist with a group of self-styled experts, a.k.a. public intellectuals, filling time.
The subject is a mystery out there in the taiga, far, far away. One of the scientist from the panel journeys there. Yep, he declares an hour later, it is a mystery. End. Near Tunguska, you may ask? Dunno but that is implied.
The mystery is a wall in the title but not for the camera and in some of the subtitles (the only two words of Russian I mastered in our two weeks there were da and nyet) it is a cloud or mass of ground fog that in a blink appears, for a time, and then in another blink disappears right on schedule.
People who venture into the cloud get confused, have visions from their past that have been altered (I think). The subtitles were hard to follow, the more so since I was doing a crossword puzzle at the time, and the video is very poor quality. Even those near the wall get confused like this. Me, too. In response the army has cordoned off the area in the tradition of science fiction movies, although the military presence seems to consist mostly one young officer.
Through the haze of the film and the haphazard subtitles I never did quite follow the narration. There is a scientist on the scene with his wife, but since he is confused by the daydreams induced by the wall, he is supposed to be replaced by the scientist from the panel and return to Moscow for re-education in McKinsey managementese. However, he stays. Wall mystification is preferable to him, it seems, than another bout of McKinsey management. Easy to sympathise with that.
The wall (or cloud, or fog, or sometimes dome) reappears like clockwork and covers several kilometres. Some suspect it is an alien intelligence trying to communicate with us and there are references to Mars and Martians strewn through the dialogue. Finding intelligent humans is a long shot. Indeed it is pretty much all talk and no action and then it ends without exposition or resolution.
See, just like Solaris.
While the early scenes in a television studio would have been cheap to make, the later scenes in the snowfields would have been much more expensive, even if they were only a few miles from MosFilm HQ and not in the distant Siberian taiga.
I always assume Soviet films had official approval, and so always wonder what the approving comrades thought they were getting and what they thought of what they got. Solaris, Stalker, and now The Wall, are each a case in point.