Arquivo

Following enigmatic transmissions from the remainders of the space station orbiting the planet Solaris, psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to investigate and evaluate the crisis that has hit the crew of astronauts. Upon arrival, Kelvin comes face to face with the same mysterious phenomenon afflicting the Solaris space station. The science fiction novel of the same name was written by Polish author Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006), who only allowed it to be adapted after much insistence from Tarkovsky. The director even proposed filming it as a love story, without space travel, to the author but Lem did not agree. “It’s an adventure that happens mainly inside the mind of a man (…) and Kelvin only has a single goal in Solaris: to show that love is indispensable to any life form”, later said the director in the year of his death. Nevertheless, the authorities sold the feature fi lm to the West as “the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey”, by Stanley Kubrick, a fi lm that displeased the Russian director due to its dependence on sophisticated special effects. It’s clear to see that rather than sophisticated travel through hyperspace and preemptive visions of new technologies, Solaris follows dizzying psychological explorations by the way of the occupants of a space station suffering from strange phenomena as a result of their proximity to a mysterious planet. Like a living brain, an agent provocateur, the heavenly body conjures missing people who were only present in the minds of the astronauts. Subject to these tangible hallucinations, they are forced to reexamine crucial questions in their lives, as if in purgatory. “All of life orbits this definition: to change oneself, that should be the only life goal of any man. However, I don’t discard the idea that purgatory might be here right now, on Earth…” said Tarkovsky about Solaris.