The salvation of humanity lies in its shame...

Solyaris (1972)

This is an old classic with is regular slow pattern, long camera holds and raw editing. My friend who is a fan of the seventies and eighties will love this. I would beg to differ, till the last half hour of the film.

The movie is boring for a guy like me, who watches slick and fast movies like Sin City and A Wednessday. But I'm also a man of patience. You need to give every director a chance to put forth his vision and be patient with his work. Only after he says "the end" are you allowed to rip his case apart. I wouldn't do that to Andrei Tarkovsky!

The movie starts off as a sci-fi thriller where a psychologist is sent to a spaceship where only three disturbed inhabitants live, over the solaris ocean. This ocean is an ever changing body which produces magnectic fields to produce the so-called hallucinations. It actually brings out the deepest and darkest fears and griefs of these people and produces them in a real, animate form.

Let me explain - the psychologist meets his wife on this ship who had died ten years ago beacuse of a mistake of the psychologist. He could never forgive himself. He develops an emotional and physical bond with this "wife" But both of them know that she isn't human. Infact she has no recollection of anything more than what he knows about her. She is a fiction of his imagination, only for real. She doesnt feel emotion, doesn't sleep or eat. Even when the psychologist gets rid of her, a new "wife" comes the next day.

This is how every person on the spaceship is tormented till they eventually commit suicide. In this psychobabble, philosophy and psychology are mixed to form one of the most brilliant endings of a movie I've seen in recent times. The story in the last half hour just hits you and you are left thinking of the unanswerable question in life : What is life?

The psychologist eventually lands on a solaris island where he meets his father (with whom he obviously has conflicts!) He chooses to stay in a world of illusion than to face the reality. A sort of cocoon of protection, a bubble ready to burst, a great line yet to be written...

Rate - 3.5/5

Tolstoy - Sleep is one of the great levellers. A king sleeps like a pauper and a pauper sleeps like a king!