cenes is a new column here at Stylus, applying the idea behind the long-running Seconds: Perfect Moments in Pop series to the world of cinema. In each piece, a writer will tackle a particular scene—or even a shot—much in the same way Seconds attempts to dissect a significant moment within a song. The approach is up to the writer. They may analyze the scene from a technical standpoint, discuss the dramatic elements in play, talk about what it may mean to them personally, or take the concept in another direction entirely. Enjoy.

Steven Soderbergh describes the sequence as “pure cinema” on the DVD commentary, relating the technical elements of the shots, the camera positions, the palette, and the characters’ movements to one of the film’s producers, James Cameron. As he envisioned it, the images drive the narrative, without out too much intrusive dialogue getting in the way. But Solaris doesn’t exactly lend itself to dialogue—or, for that matter, exposition—considering its austerely hermetic subject matter: or more clearly, a minimalist, sci-fi psychological drama adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s novel by the same name and, for measure, influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky’s own 1972 adaptation.

Some context, though: George Clooney’s character, the psychologist Chris Kelvin, is tasked to investigate the crew of a wayward research mission orbiting the planet of Solaris. Upon his arrival, he’s unable to understand, both from the crew and for himself, why they are unable to leave of their own volition. The answer appears to be Solaris—a diaphanous, amethyst-hued planet teeming with electromagnetism, and seemingly the reflector of the thoughts and desires of those who encounter it. Setting down to sleep his first night on the ship, Kelvin quickly realizes the planet’s gripping effect. A series of hard cuts—from Clooney’s head at rest, his eyes shut, to a woman clutching a door knob on a train (Clooney’s subjective gaze our own), to Solaris pulsing—set the tone.

To be sure, Solaris is dictating the action here, evidenced by the jagged and unbroken currents of light traversing the planet’s surface, not unlike firing synapses, heading toward collision. Kelvin’s dreaming of the first time he meet his wife, the deceased Rheya (Natascha McElhone), and Soderbergh renders it with elegiac deftness, Cliff Martinez’s synth-inspired electronica score suffusing the scene with an ambience at once understated and keenly foreboding. Another hard cut to Kelvin sleeping, and then back to Solaris, and now Kelvin is leading us into a dimly lit restaurant (another long, continuous subjective shot) where Rheya spots him (us) walking in. Where it’s usually Clooney who’s deployed to do the cajoling, the charming of the audience, it is already a given that we should be on his side; instead, Rheya is warming the viewer, showing us what it must’ve felt like to be Kelvin, gazed upon so adoringly.

Rheya is, therefore, what holds this sequence so closely together. Her warm, open face and fluid, beguiling eyes are besotting, carrying herself, as she does, with an amour-propre that is neither self-involved nor punitive. And yet, she’s still looking at Kelvin, from across the restaurant now, her pursed lips beginning to curl spryly, as if to offer some off-color bon mot. We watch her rise from her table and slink across the restaurant, her gait coquettishly self-aware, toward a private bar, where, doubtless, she waits for us. Clooney’s subject-position is our own as we walk into the private bar. Here, we are alone with Rheya, and the tight shot on her face is obviously at her employ. While it feels as though Clooney’s Kelvin has balked, Rheya’s importuning blitheness staggering him, it is actually the viewer who is without words. And then she saves us, mockingly though, by interceding on our mouth’s behalf: “Don’t blow it.” Such pluck, such brio.

Finally, Clooney’s Kelvin re-asserts himself, rejoining with an urbane bromide that would almost certainly falter were it anyone else. Still, we’re a part of the tête-à-tête, and soon we appreciate what Rheya must have meant to Kelvin; how equally matched their wit, their charm, and their love for each other must have been; and, of course, how her absence was likely nothing short of an absence of himself.

She puts him on his heels, again, asking him to quote some poetry, any poetry, for which he reaches to Dylan Thomas. The shot fades entirely to black as Kelvin tenders, rather portentously, “And death shall have no dominion.” Now they are side by side, Clooney back in the picture, on a descending elevator. A safe timidity and contentedness relaxes their faces while, ever so incrementally, they reach for each other’s hand—both sensing, though neither willing to admit, the gravity of the moment.

Meanwhile in the material world, Kelvin is slowly waking up to find an opaque figure hovering over his bed. Surprisingly, astonishingly, the figure is Rheya in toto, having materialized from thin air through the conspiring of his memory and Solaris. Metaphysical and ontological concerns are put aside, rightly, and Kelvin’s professional detachment lapses. His deceased wife stands before him, and this is explanation enough of exactly what Solaris is up to. Dylan Thomas’s poem is named-checked for a reason, then, not least because it invokes the indestructibility of matter, in one sense, and the continuation of memory, in another. “Though lovers be lost,” Thomas goes on to say, “Love shall not.”