Solaris is known for being the least 'artsy' of Tarkovsky's films, and because of that I've had to argue with many people that the film shouldn't be under-estimated.
While the film is based on a novel, I find it hard to see, from watching the film, how it could have been written as a novel. The film plays with questions about a person's knowledge of their lover, questions about eternal life, and issues of presence and absence, but it plays with all of these issues in a way that constantly returns to the issue of cinema.
The plot, in the simplest form, involves a psychologist who goes to a space station to investigate strange things happening on board. The station orbits a planet which is supposed to 
be alive and has strange powers. After spending some time on the station he discovers his dead wife living in his room. The other people on the station explain that the planet can create individuals based on the person's memory of them, though these individuals are only manifestations from memory, and not the actual person. The man has a hard time dealing with this woman who is his wife, but is not really his wife, the woman asks the other scientists to destroy her (she cannot commit suicide) so she does not hurt him anymore.
The reason why I have a hard time imagining this in book form (I would like to read the book soon), is because the physical existence of the woman is so deeply accentuated in the film, that it is hard to dismiss her as an idea, a delusion if you will. The film is constant emphasizing that she is there, and that she has form (not to mention that she is beautiful). She feels the effects of gravity, she goes into spasms of pain. Yet in the beginning she appears out of nowhere.
The idea I think intersects with the description of the afterlife in the first episode of The Decalogue, where the Father tells his son that after someone dies the memories are important "that they smiled a lot, that a tooth is missing." After someone dies they go from being an individual with the possibility to possibility to inspire love, or anger, or to act upon a situation. When you are dead you are nothing but an idea, what the Decalogue says is that the afterlife is really the idea of your living potential. It is the longing memory of something magical that no longer is, something living, breathing, and trembling.
In Solaris the 'no longer exists' exists again. The idea of a person returns to the full potentiality of that person in a physical form. Not only does she again have the potential to inspire feelings, but she has the full physicality of life, with all the suffering and beauty it implies... the psychologist in his state of breakdown discusses the possibility that humans cannot accept God's miracles.
I could not really tell you how to answer all the questions this film brings up. Whether or not the idea of a person is the same as a person except for the lack of potential. No one could tell you the full value of physicality (except maybe Heidegger). But what affirms in a way that seems to have to me the force of a logical arguement is that the true self is not a set of emotions or attitudes, that the soul and the body are in essence one thing, and neither can be judged as good or evil.
There are only two things that this movie finds it possible to judge, life, which is full of the wonder of beauty and possibility, and death, which is only the horror of silence.
The movie is beautiful, you should buy Solaris here
Blockade is currently running the film festival circuit, and it is unclear how much distribution it is going to get. It has been doing well though, with showing at two of the top Czech film festivals (this is the only film market I am really following, since I live in the country. I get American film news by osmosis).
If you do happen to see that this film is showing anywhere, I suggest going to see it. The film is not really a film in the usual sense. It is a collection of amateur film images taken during the blockade of Stalingrad during World War II. If any of you don't know your World War II history I suggest checking wikipedia's entry on the battle of Stalingrad. Suffice it to be said here, that the film is about one of the most bloody battles in human history, where over the course of 6 months nearly 2 million people died.
I have a certain facination with the idea of war and our ability for understand the actual experience of being sent knowingly to your death for something resembling a cause (At one point during the battle the average life expectancy for a Russian soldier was a day). Film can never depict 'what war is.' As Bazin says, “War, with its harvest of dead bodies, its immense destructiveness, its countless migrations, its concentration camps, and its atomic bombs, leaves far behind the
creative art that aims at reconstituting it.”
If film wants to depict war, it has to instead show a concept deriving from the idea of war, and one that is filmable. Thus the innumberable war films that we see every day, are either about the glory of fighting for your country, or the tragedy of dying for your country (often both, depending on your political persuasion). Neither of these 'ideas' really give any credence to the fact that war inevitably involves dying, they have to cleverly avoid the subject because dying is something that is impossible to understand, and the horrors of war leave far behind the creative art that aims at reconstituting it.
Certain films, and I usually classify these films as brilliant (see Apocalypse Now, and After Life), manage to get past this impossible challenge, and play directly with the idea of life and death, the wonder of one, and the horror of the other. I generally go into a war film hoping that this is the issue at hand, not "honor" "glory" or even "tragedy." War is about death and horror, nothing more, and its films should be about the same.
I was not disappointed by Blockade, though I did get something that I did not expect. I expected to go into a film that showed the experience of people surrounded by death. What the film shows you is people surrounded by life. This hour long film is made up of a collection of images of people walking the streets, going to the grocery store, talking to each other. Though people were dying everywhere, what you saw was people trying their best to live, you saw that life has to go on despite the murders all around us.
The last shot was of people being hung, those were the only dead bodies you see in the entire film.
The film is one of the best expressions I've seen of the need to live.
I have not been able to find any place to buy the DVD, if anyone finds one, please contact me.
If you ever meet someone from Russia who was born after 1975, and you mention you've seen this movie, you will immediately be their friend. The film seems to be in the style of a sketch film, though the style doesn't so much capture "moments in time," as sketch films usually do, but instead is used to accentuates the haphazardness of the main characters actions, and his never ending resourcefulness.
The essential plot is that a young man, after finishing his time in the military, goes to Moscow to find his brother, who is involved in local organized crime. The brother wants to get rid of one of his competitors without looking like he is responsible, so he gets his brother to do it, and then tries to sell him out to the rival gang. The brother though, despite being in his early twenties, and more concerned with girls and music then with money and crime, is unusually 
good with guns, a fast thinker, and can always get the better of the people who are after him.
Though I'm not Russian, I've always had the impression that Russians like to look at themselves like the main character of this movie. They like simple things, are nice to people, just wander around from day to day, but for some reason everyone is always after them, and they have to be resourceful to survive. The main character in this film seems to just be wandering from place to place trying to make his way in Moscow, making friends with people on the street, and he just occasionally has to shoot up a member of the mafia that's after him.
Its a charming film, see it if you have the chance.
Buy Brother here
