A man in a blue jacket stands by a beautiful pond in the morning mist.
A feeder stream gurgles gently as the submerged swamp grass undulates
below the surface in a graceful rhythm. The atmosphere is sentient,
vaguely mystical. The man circles the watery enclave... he might be
looking for someone or something, or he might be a scientist observing
details, mechanisms, in the swampy margins... or he might be considering
suicide.
Lem's novel has a similar poetic mysticism to that of the British
author David Lindsay's A Voyage To Arcturus-- which may have been
an influence. Tarkovsky's interpretation is excellent in terms of sound
and image and spiritual empathy. Although it's thirty years since Solaris was filmed, the technology doesn't appear dated due to
Tarkovsky's emphasis on the human rather than the technology.
So it's uneven. But you can always go with the flow....
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 fathers 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
SOLARIS
<
BACK