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.
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