Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris is a visually hypnotic, deeply
affecting story of conscience, love, and reconciliation. The film opens with
a view of a lake, as seaweed undulate beneath the current. The camera then
pans to reveal a pensive psychologist, Dr. Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis),
out for an afternoon stroll at his estranged father's country house. Kelvin
has been writing a highly influential report for the Solaristics board in
response to the strange data being transmitted to ground control by the
three remaining cosmonauts aboard the orbiting space station: Dr. Snouth
(Yuri Yarvet), Dr. Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn), and Dr. Gibarian (Sos
Sarkisyan). The Solaris program is at a crossroads, and Kelvin has been
appointed to visit the crew, report on their mental health, and recommend a
course of action to the agency. On the day before his flight, a former
cosmonaut, Berton (Vladislav Dvozhetsky), his father’s personal friend and
colleague, visits him. Years earlier, Berton was sent on a search and rescue
mission for a missing cosmonaut, and had a first-hand encounter with the
bizarre metamorphosis of the Solaris ocean. Despite Berton's impassioned
pleas not to stifle the exploration of the unknown, Kelvin is unmoved,
believing that human emotion has no bearing in the search for Truth,
and raises the possibility of, not only abandoning the Solaris mission, but
irradiating the turbulent ocean in order to destroy its inexplicable
activity. Upon arriving at the space station, Kelvin is greeted with apathy
and evasion, along with the tragic news of Gibarian's suicide. A videotaped
message shows a frail, disheveled Gibarian driven to despair by tormented
visions of a lost loved one, and a profound sense of isolation. After a
restless night's sleep, Kelvin begins to realize the validity of Berton and
the crew's seeming hallucinations after his dead wife, Hari (Natalya
Bondarchuk), mysteriously reappears on the station.
By setting up artificial boundaries, we squash the idea that thought
is limitless - Dr. Messinger
Similar to Tarkovsky’s other films
Andrei Rublev (1966) and The
Sacrifice (1986), Solaris is an unsettling portrait of man's
inequitable, often destructive interaction with his environment. Inherent in
the tenets of the Solaris mission is a preconceived theoretical filter that
accepts only those phenomena that can be logically explained or physically
proven. Some scientists have hypothesized that the Solaris ocean is a
thinking substance, a primordial brain, capable of realizing thought.
However, lacking concrete evidence, Berton's deposition to the Solaristics
board is met with skepticism and calls for the immediate termination of the
program. A mission scientist, Dr. Messinger, eventually succeeds in
dissuading the board from canceling the project by exposing their innate
fears, which lead them to impose artificial barriers to conceal Truth, and proposing that the strange phenomenon, itself, is cause
for further study, and not an excuse for an apprehensive retreat. In
reality, it is not the failure of technology that impedes the
attainment of Truth, but humanity’s own inertia and myopic vision.
The theme of self-created boundaries, similarly explored in Tarkovsky’s
Stalker (1979), proposes that there are no real impediments in the
search for Truth, only a perceived fear of the unknown, and a
sanctity in oblivion. The appearance of Hari on the space station elicits
the same instinctive response from Kelvin, preferring to send her away in a
crew escape vehicle, rather than confronting the difficult issues
surrounding her suicide. Similar to the board presiding over Berton’s
deposition, Kelvin initially chooses to abandon the mission and destroy that
which he cannot understand. However, after arriving at the space station,
Kelvin, shown literally stumbling onto the mystery of Solaris, realizes that
it is a reluctant journey that he is compelled to take. In essence, by
beaming x-rays at the surface of the Solaris ocean, the crew has unwittingly
crossed the threshold of the board’s artificial exploratory boundaries: the
point of no return. Through irradiation, the cosmonauts have performed a
figurative cerebral probe into the recesses of the primordial mind of
Solaris, which is answered with a reflection of their own subconscious.
We are in the foolish position of a man striving for a goal he fears
and does not want - Dr. Snouth
The idea of frontier exploration as a natural evolution in the search for
Truth proves to be a convenient diversion from personal regret and
isolation. After Berton's abrupt departure, we see Kelvin burning documents
and photographs in his father's backyard, attempting to divorce himself from
his past. However, aboard the vast, isolated space station, he cannot escape
the guilt of his wife's abandonment and, inevitably, her suicide. When Hari
initially appears, she is frightened and helpless, and Kelvin responds with
denial and cruelty, unable to reconcile with his own emotional ambivalence
over her return. When Hari reappears on the following evening, she is
tenacious and possessive. But is this the Hari who took her own life…or the
Hari who was sent away in a rocket…or yet still, another new Hari?
More importantly, if this is not the real Hari, then is this
Hari an accurate reflection of how she truly was, clinging and desperate,
incapable of surviving without him? Or rather, is she a projection of his
own needs of her?
As Kelvin briefly separates from
Hari, she crashes through a metal door,
panic-stricken, and severely cuts herself. Kelvin returns to tend to her,
only to find that her deep wounds have already healed. He introduces her to
the crew, who already know that she is a Guest--a physical
manifestation of Kelvin's subconscious, a Solaris-generated realization of his wife. Experiments have confirmed that the
Guests are not biologically human, but composed of neutrinos
stabilized by the local force field, and, consequently, Dr. Sartorius
suggests an autopsy of her. However, despite irrefutable proof, Kelvin
disagrees with his conclusion, believing that he has been given a second
chance to reconcile with his wife, and refuses to acknowledge that she is
not who she appears to be.
But it is soon evident that Guest Hari is truly not his wife.
Devoid of personal memories and defined solely though her relationship with
her husband, Guest Hari is without individual identity. In an attempt
to understand the essence of Hari’s life, she asks him about their troubled
relationship, realizing that she cannot be the real Hari. Although
she is an accurate physical replica of the real Hari, she is also an interpreted, transferred memory of her. However, if
Guest Hari
is, indeed, a subjective perception of the real Hari conjured
from fragments of Kelvin's subconscious, then the question arises: Is she,
then, Kelvin’s idealization of the real Hari, or a manifestation of
his own fears? Is his affection for Guest Hari a reflection of his
own guilt of survival, or an innate longing for connection, an intimacy that
never existed during his difficult, abbreviated marriage to the real Hari, an emotional
Contact?
I’m something quite different
- Hari
The behavior of the crew towards the Solaris
Guests defines their
occupationally inherent characters. The suicidal Gibarian, a physiologist,
seems unable to reconcile his beloved’s reappearance with his profound grief
for her real physical loss. Snouth, a cybernetics expert, appears
incoherent and mad, interacting with Guests in unorthodox ways,
attempting to achieve the sought after extra-terrestrial Contact. He
regards the Guests as a communicative challenge rather than an alien
curiosity. Sartorius, an astrobiologist, is the least affected of the crew,
logical and impassive, seeing the Guests, not as cognitive beings
with whom he can interact, but as empirical, molecular puzzles. Their
appearance on the station provides an inexhaustible supply of subjects for
his research. Intrigued by their regenerative capability, he views them as a
potential conduit to immortality.
Sartorius, contemptuous and dismissive of
Guest Hari, trivializes
her existence as an interconnected assembly of unstable neutrinos, as antimatter, a classification akin to defining man as a simple
carbon-based cellular network. However, if the essence of humanity lies
beyond physical composition or common ancestry, then it must reside in
attributes that separate man from other living organisms: the human
soul. Furthermore, if a unique soul does define humanity, then its
intrinsic recognition must be universally evident among all of mankind,
irrespective of geography. Reason and emotion are inherent properties of the
human soul, transcending the cultural and ideological bounds of a created
society. Possessing rational thought, compassion, and conscience, Guest Hari is, in many ways, more human than the emotionally
inscrutable Sartorius. Her capacity for selfless sacrifice and unconditional
love are manifestations of a real soul, and consequently, define her
humanity. Though not innately human, she has evolved to become one.
Solaris is an exploration beyond the vessel of humanity, a journey
to extend the territorial bounds of man, only to find the vast frontier of
his own subconscious. In a society driven to explore the farthest reaches of
the universe in search of Truth, the Solaris ocean provides an
introspective catalyst for probing the deepest regions of the human soul.
But inevitably, the Truth proves to be as elusive as the thinly
veiled reality of Solaris: Can a man truly reconcile with his irretrievable
past, or is he inexorably bound to the guilt and regret of his spiritual
longing?
From
SENSE
OF CINEMA
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