The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 10-16
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
For a movie set primarily on a half-abandoned space station, Tarkovsky’s third film is more about the tangled webs of human memory, consciousness, and the lasting impressions of guilt and grief than rocketships, alien probes or even aliens themselves (depending, of course, on your definition of “alien life”). Psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) arrives at the Solaris outpost to investigate rumors of hallucinations and madness amongst the dwindling crew. Although skeptical, Kris experiences a manifestation of his late wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk). It isn’t his wife, but a neutrino-based life form that takes the physical and emotional state of Hari as perceived by Kris’ consciousness. Hari seeks liberation in various ways: initially childlike and then with growing ferocity as she discovers her identity and grapples with the consequences of being both a figure of Kris’ memory and imagination, albeit with desires of her own. Colorful, strange, brooding and evocative, Russia’s answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey reaches its climax in the enigmatic final scene. Is true existence only in the mind? If so, does that make it less important? Celina Reynes (Opens May 12 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in a new digital restoration)