I Am Love and Solaris

I Am Love

I Am Love shared many common threads with Madame Bovary. Both convey the darker, more sinister nature of desire; they show the way desire can distort your perspective and result in serious, sometimes fatal consequences. In I Am Love, Eduardo and Betta both suffer the consequences of their mother’s desire; In Madame Bovary, Berthe is the ultimate victim. Class is an underlying issue in both plotlines, with Recchi resenting it and Bovary yearning for it.

Emma Bovary and Emma Recchi are fundamentally very similar. They are obligated to uphold a particular class and image that they internally resent to others in their social group. Both are stuck in marriages to miserable men who lack any sort of attractive qualities. Charles might as well have been a mannequin and Tancredi doesn’t exactly possess a broad collection of positive attributes. Emma longs for a more passionate love affair, and Antonio enchants her instantly. Some of the lengths she goes to simply to run into him are embarrassing and slightly creepy. Emma Recchi was a cougar on the prowl in the purest sense of the term.

Emma doesn’t want to be one of the Recchi wives anymore. She’s under the spell of the ‘grass-is-greener’ syndrome and desperately wants to leave the Recchi’s decadent estate for Antonio’s simple, secluded country house. Emma allows her desire to destroy her family and relationships from the inside out. Her relationship with Eduardo was at stake and she treated it with an indelicate hand. I do not fault her for desiring something better for herself, but I do resent that she abandoned her family in a state of distress. Eduardo’s death was at her hands and her betrayal was a selfish one.

Solaris

Solaris is specifically concerned with melancholia and it perfectly demonstrated the theme of death as the only means to end the suffering caused by insatiable desire. Each member of the crew has a visitor, a phantom copy of a loved one or relative whose absence haunts him or her.  Rheya reappears as a mirror of some part of Chris Kelvin’s brain. She is a phantom onto whom Chris can project his idealized image of her. However, parts of his memory still taint the image, as shown by her defiance and suicidal tendencies.

One recollection of Rheya’s stands out in my memory – the memory of her imaginary friend Mikashelli. Rheya’s mother would only speak to her through Mikashelli, who lived under the wallpaper in the corner of her bedroom. Rheya knew that her friend was imaginary, but she still counted on it as a means of communication with her mother. It may have seemed silly, but it allowed for an exchange that would not have otherwise been able to happen. In the same way, Chris uses the phantom as a vehicle for communication. He knows that Rheya is contrived from his imagination, but it’s the only way he knows to communicate with her and her memory.

Something that caught my attention was that at the beginning of the movie, Rheya describes their apartment together as having no pictures or decorations on the wall, not even on the fridge.  However, there is a photo of Rheya on the wall in the abortion fight scene, shortly after her death, and in the final scene when they are reunited in death or something in between. If Rheya were a projection of Chris’s memory, wouldn’t she know that there are pictures on the wall?

The phantom of Dr. Gibarian's son haunts Kelvin as his own aborted child. In the scene where Kelvin chooses to stay on the station instead of going back to earth with Gordon, the little boy approaches him and holds his hand. We are then transported back to Chris’s apartment, where he lives with Rheya. In the last scene, he cuts his finger and it heals itself while he runs it under water. He, like Rheya, is no longer human. If Chris is a phantom now as well, then whose memory are they mirroring? Is Solaris a planet that fulfills your desire? Must you exchange your humanity in order to unite the idealized image of desire with the seeming reality?