In the Flesh: Solaris (1972)

Solaris is a masterpiece. Not exactly an original analysis, but so comprehensively the case that the fact of it has endured fifty years of repetition. It will likely endure fifty more. The jaw-droppingly simple special effects (acetone, colored dye, aluminum powder) used to conjure up the titular planet’s alien ocean, the research space station’s battered, lived-in design, the haunting opening sequence in which a broken man shows footage of his own public collapse to family friends — on every level, the film is a work of daringly confrontational genius. Burton’s (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) rambling recitation of flying his rescue aircraft through a viscous fog bank and seeing gardens formed from yellow sludge and plaster rising from the sea and then disintegrating is an image so vivid there’s no need to depict it, a product of unseen intelligence for us in the same way it and the other “guests” created by the planet’s sentient ocean exist to the film’s characters. A dead man’s orphaned son, four meters tall, floating in a liquid haze. It doesn’t matter whether or not we see it. Knowing it’s been seen is enough to make skin crawl.

Ultimately, both the horror and the beauty of Solaris are contained with a simple kernel of thought: the planet’s sea can know us as we cannot know each other or ourselves. It can breach the veil of personhood, but is itself inhuman and unknowable. The void can know us as we cannot know the void, can reveal us to ourselves without offering up anything of itself. When it resurrects staid, analytical psychiatrist Kris Kelvin’s (played by Donatas Banionis, voiced by Vladimir Zamansky) dead wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), Kelvin is so distraught he launches the double into space, destroying it and burning himself badly in the process. He ruminates often as the film progresses on whether or not he can love something alive, or whether memory is the only medium through which one human can truly relate to another. Tarkovsky’s characters talk to themselves as much as to each other as they struggle with these questions, the station’s other inhabitants hiding their own strange visitors, their own inner worlds as labyrinthine and emotionally complex as Kelvin’s. The little glimpses we catch are unsettling and compelling. An ear and the nape of a neck over the edge of a hammock. A dwarf in a smock running alone through the dirty halls.

“We never seem to find the time to talk,” says Kelvin’s father (Nikolai Grinko) on the eve of his son’s departure for Solaris. Kelvin first expresses gratitude for his father’s admission, then picks a fight over Burton’s intrusion on their last day together. When, at the film’s conclusion, Kelvin gives himself over entirely to the lure of the living sea, the reality it conjures for him is a perfect recreation of his father’s home. Within, his father sorts through water-damaged books. Kelvin collapses at his feet and wraps his arms around the older man, overcome by emotion. The buried drives of his subconscious have brought him not back to his father’s arms but to the knowledge that he left them, to the certainty that they will never be together again, that all their chances are spent. He isn’t rectifying the mistake he made by leaving their relationship unresolved, he’s giving himself fully to the hole it’s left in him. Solaris forces us to stare into the vast gulf between desire and action, and to consider whether the shape of our suffering bears any relation to the shape of our grief.