Supernatural yearnings

Solaris, starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone, is a challenging, abstract and eerily beautiful film that dares to be different.

A love story set within a science fiction framework, it offers the grieving a second chance, a world where they can be reunited with the one they have lost. In Dr Chris Kelvin’s (Clooney) case, his wife.

The powers of Solaris are discovered by psychologist Kelvin when he is asked to board the spaceship Prometheus, which has entered the planet’s atmosphere, and bring about the safe return of the crew which has mysteriously cut off contact with Earth.

The reason is not immediately obvious when the two remaining members are found in a state of extreme anxiety and paranoia, but in a subtle plot that slowly reels the audience into its alternate-reality state, the emotional hold of this new world is revealed.

Solaris reunites each crew member with someone who they love deeply, who has been separated from them by death and who they thought they would not meet again. But it is not generous enough to sweep away time, or somehow alter the tragic event that stole that someone away. It is more demanding than that.

When Kelvin is brought face to face with his dead wife Rhena (McElhone), she returns to him in every sense other than the very original. Her personality, looks, thought processes and feelings for him are all there. Yet it is not really her in the human sense. A being from Solaris has emulated her.

For the relationship to succeed, it requires an acceptance of that which isn’t quite real. Director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven) forces his hero to alter his perceptions of reality to achieve the happiness he desires in being reunited with his wife. He is forced to decide whether he would rather embark on a metaphysical relationship and live within a comfortable ‘perception’ of what is real to take away the pain of that loss, or live on alone in his reality on Earth.

Ultimately Kelvin is seduced all over again by the persona of the woman he married, whose character has become all the more vulnerable because he is seeing her in the emotional state she was in before she died: an argument about her abortion led to her committing suicide.

Inspired by Tarkovsky's three-hour 1972 Russian adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel,Solaris is a stunning and emotionally compelling film. George Clooney lobbied to play the leading role and his portrayal of a man torn between desire and rationale is outstanding.