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Roman Polanski

Perhaps the most irreconcilable and disturbing of all filmmakers, he possesses a sort of quiet mastery that doesn’t seem to be in vogue these days.

Roman Polanski
Photo: The Museum of Modern Art

Roman Polanski, perhaps the most irreconcilable and disturbing of all filmmakers, possesses a sort of quiet mastery that doesn’t seem to be in vogue these days. The release of Polanski’s most recent film, The Ghost Writer, last winter almost opposite of Martin Scorsese’s technically amazing yet ludicrously overbearing Shutter Island succinctly illustrated the kind of cinema that audiences, even professed cinephiles, seem to be more frequently favoring. Scorsese put on an obsessive formal fireworks show that was intent on living up to its director’s status as a creator of culturally minted masterpieces, while Polanski quietly exhilarated with his immense knowledge of the kind of film craft that moves a story forward with two frames of film when another director may have needed 15.

The Ghost Writer, one of the best films of 2010, was pulp that was unmistakably for adults—the work of a master taking pleasure in his command of technique. The film also tells the story that has chiefly concerned Polanski’s work: that of a (comparative) innocent who’s somehow simultaneously more naïve and corruptible than he believes himself to be—a lesson he’s bound to learn the hard way. The Ghost Writer is a sharp, sexy, disconcertingly intimate political thriller that concludes with a final image that brings to mind the devastating concluding futility of Polanski’s more despairing Chinatown: The ghost’s pursuits ultimately add up to a bunch of disconnected pages blowing in the wind.

The Ghost Writer deserved to become a hit, but it ultimately made in its total American release less than a typical Happy Madison production earns in its first weekend. Some columnists assumed the film, which was favorably reviewed, financially underperformed because it was overshadowed by the reemergence of the controversy that has haunted Polanski’s reputation since the late 1970s: the dispute in Switzerland that he should be forced to return to America for a statutory rape charge that has been heavily contested and endlessly debated for more than 30 years. Yet, controversy or not, The Ghost Writer is the type of witty, assured piece of filmmaking that our frenzied, hyperbolic pop culture has increasingly less room for, which makes the Museum of Modern Art’s forthcoming, and impressively exhaustive, Polanski retrospective seem all the more comforting and, yes, even vital to introducing to new students of film one of cinema’s most polarizing masters.

The Polish Polanski, who’s worked on various original scripts (almost always with a co-writer) as well as adaptations of plays and novels both minor and classic, and across several countries and in a variety of languages, has amassed a body of work with a thematic unity that’s shocking when you consider the jolting professional and personal speed bumps of his life. Polanski’s films are almost all dark comedies of futility concerned with perhaps that most essential, and existential, of human torments: the inability to truly know anything, whether it be a society, or a lover (especially a lover), or a friend, or even one’s self. Social order is always on the verge of collapse, or, at the very least re-contextualization, in a Polanski film.

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If Polanski’s preoccupations have remained mostly consistent, then his perspectives and approaches have, as you’d expect of a professional in a business for over four decades, evolved. And while I generally loathe neatly contextualizing a man’s entire professional life with prescribed categories, I’ve decided that Polanski’s evolution as a filmmaker can be roughly charted by placing his films in four admittedly debatable and extremely malleable phases that don’t always entirely fall into chronological order, thus rebutting the idea that a man’s life follows one tidy ever-progressing forward course, a notion that most of Polanski’s films would hold in contempt.

The Film Brat

Admittedly the most literal phase, as several of the films covered here were made by Polanski during or right after film school as a man in his early 20s during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The short films right away mark their director as someone with an unerring sense of composing images that develop character relationships while moving the narrative forward—a skill that eludes several A-list American filmmakers. The most famous of Polanski’s shorts is Two Men and a Wardrobe, and while it has its charms, such as that wonderful final shot, it’s one of a number of films that prove that the director isn’t very funny when he’s working in a broad comic style; he’s more comfortable with the kind of gallows humor that sneaks up on you. A Murderer and A Toothful Smile, both early simple sketches of a single scene each, pack more of a punch, and hint at his flair for suggestive, leering evil—and, in the case of A Toothful Smile, his misogyny—that would come to define a key period in the filmmaker’s work. When Angels Fall is a technically accomplished war story that revels in the sort of melodrama that Polanski would largely avoid in his professional work, though it has a ghostly beauty that’s undeniably incredible for a blossoming filmmaker in his early 20s. Mammals and The Fat and the Lean are also visually distinctive, but somewhat tedious in their symbolism and Becket allusions (hints of Cul-de-Sac abound). The best of the shorts though is the disturbing The Lamp, in which the young Polanski spins a terrifying seven-minute film mostly out of images of inanimate objects.

These shorts establish Polanski as an ambitious young director torn between his mysterious, occasionally erotic images and the compulsion to sermonize with blunt symbols that overstate their cause—a tendency that he would refine in his first feature films. If Knife in the Water is undeniably a “student” film in its preoccupation with symbol and thesis, then it must rank as one of the greatest student films ever made. A tough, unsentimental, disturbing, and influential film (it’s obviously an influence on Dead Calm, and Adrian Lynn quoted the final image in Unfaithful, among many others), Knife in the Water is decidedly, and crucially, less earnest than the short films Polanski made to prepare for it.

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At this point, Polanski had already perfected a tone of bemused, festering obsession that’s deceptively casual somehow over- and under-wrought at the same time; his darkest films are normally his funniest and most perverse, and this is visually complemented with a shrewd, succinct sense of narrative framing as well as with the use of symbolism that gradually became more tongue and cheek. The symbolism in a Polanski film, especially his work in the 1960s, is so heightened and sometimes so obvious as to be a joke—which it is, but it’s a joke that undermines precisely none of the escalating tension and dread, as it comments on the characters’ usually kinky preoccupations. A typical Polanski symbol, such as the phallic use of the knife or the boat’s mast in Knife in the Water, brings the entire narrative to a head in a fashion so deceptively leisurely that you can barely detect the filmmaker’s (considerable) control.

Repulsion, Polanski’s British-based follow-up to Knife in the Water, is anything but casual. This film, one of the most intense and unrelenting ever made, follows an attractive young woman (Catherine Denueve) as she goes mad when left alone by her sister over a period of several days. The scenario is ridiculous and sexually retrograde (Denueve loses her mind essentially because she can’t allow herself to get laid), but the staging and editing—emphasizing the claustrophobia of her escalating panic—are so superb that you probably won’t find yourself contemplating the absurdity until days after. Polanski’s films have often been mislabeled as misogynistic, but Repulsion—which exhibits only a cursory, clinical empathy for its heroine—pretty damn close substantiates that claim. That said, this blunt, savage film is one of the most honest and blatant attempts by a male filmmaker to grapple openly with the sexual resentment that lingers under the surface of more conventional thrillers, such as your average slasher film, that openly exploit the abuse of women for more insidiously prurient means.

Though Cul-de-Sac basically plays as a scrapbook of ideas that Polanski and frequent co-writer Gérard Brach may have discarded while plotting Knife in the Water and Repulsion, the film does find the filmmaker beginning to step away from the hyper-precise, portentously symbol-laden mise-en-scène of his film-school work. The staging is seemingly more improvisatory here, but the scenario is trite and a little sour in a priggish sort of way. The points that Polanski scores on his bourgeoisie hypocrites seem a little easy when compared to unresolved sexual longing and loneliness that’s sublimely captured in Knife in the Water.

The Unexpected Romantic

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The Fearless Vampire Killers, a parody of old Universal monster movies, is one of Polanski’s least rewarding movies, proving once again that the director simply isn’t that funny when he’s making a movie that’s meant to be broadly, explicitly funny. The film moves—unusually for this director—at a tortoise’s pace, failing to capture the beguiling fairy-tale pathos of the good Universal movies while also notably lacking in the sexual kink that one would hope Polanski would deliver in such a project. But the film is notable for two major reasons: the lush, beautiful camerawork evokes the cinematography Polanski would use to devastating effect later on in his career, and the presence of Sharon Tate, the beautiful young actress who would ultimately become the director’s wife. While Tate’s real story unavoidably lends Fearless Vampire Killers a heightened fatalism that wasn’t intended, Polanski’s clear affection for her, both as her co-star and her director, is the first sign the director would show of truly trying to identify with a female star—a newfound empathy that would feed directly into the creation of one of his most popular films, the legendary Rosemary’s Baby.

Rosemary’s Baby is about an ambitious, probably untalented actor, presumably satirically named Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) who eventually sells his wife (Mia Farrow) to his conniving neighbors (Ruth Gordon and Sydney Blackmer) so that they may impregnate her with the son of Satan. This great horror film wouldn’t exactly appear to make much sense as an exhibit in support of Polanski’s growing empathy toward women, except that his rapport with Farrow is unusually intimate for this period in his career. Polanski establishes from the outset an atmosphere of sordid, underground rot; and the setting allows him to make some of his favorite points about the timelessness of corruption and the gullibility and self-absorption of the baby-boomer generation. But Polanski doesn’t score points on poor, hapless Rosemary (okay, there’s a few, but if anything they only build on the audience’s sympathy); if he’d pushed the ghoulish mockery further then the film might have been unwatchable in its cruelty. Farrow’s fragile, trembling exceptional performance is always at the forefront of the film, and the director, for once, regards his central woman as a human being as opposed to an object to be art directed. With its lucid, subtle direction, Rosemary’s Baby also finds Polanski’s skill with subtly skewed “off” images that quietly inform the blossoming story. The film, a comedy of the darkest order, is ultimately about a woman whose love for her child is unconditional and unyielding.

Polanski didn’t write the next film of his that would make a major global impact, but it certainly fits his sensibility (and he did famously do uncredited rewrites). Written by Robert Towne, Chinatown, Polanski’s first film made in America since Rosemary’s Baby, is one of the definitive American film mysteries—a grand, tragic tale of a detective, nursing a prior emotional wound that remains vague, who tries to right a simple wrong and invariably uncovers pretty much the entire history of corruption in Los Angeles. Some found Chinatown cruel and suffocating (Pauline Kael famously said that Polanski sealed the picture with a “gargoyle’s grin”), but the film’s atmosphere of decay (the cinematography seems to bleed yellow) and repressed evil has a vitality that continues to linger in the popular imagination.

The Tenant, the last of Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” (following Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby) expands on the isolation of those films while more explicitly elaborating on the sadness that was creeping into Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown. Playing the titular lead himself, Polanski rents a room in a decaying Parisian apartment building that recently lost its prior tenant, a young woman, to suicide. Lonely and awkward, the new tenant becomes increasingly more preoccupied with the deceased woman, leading to a confusion of identity that builds to a haunting, and unexpectedly moving, conclusion.

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The Experimentor

Polanski directly followed Rosemary’s Baby with a version of Macbeth that’s notable for its graphic bloodshed, particularly a sequence—depicting the massacre of Macduff’s family—that was clearly and audaciously designed to resemble the murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson family. The film has a grisly force to it, but the beauty of Shakespeare’s language is, with all the prolonged dramatization of the once-off-screen barbarism, unavoidably upstaged somewhat. Polanski turned Shakespeare’s troubled, controversial play into a parable of 1970s decadence, even—in a decision reminiscent of his famous revisions of Chinatown’s once optimistic finale—adding an ending that implied that the bloodbath that just occurred was a logical and unending extension of the corruption that’s basically inherent in ambition. Macbeth is beautifully made (the countrysides practically throb with implied menace), but this film can’t help but play as a deliberately nasty creative cleansing on the part of its maker.

What?, his little-seen follow-up to Macbeth, is a 1970s sexual roundelay—said to be loosely based on Alice and Wonderland and inspired by the writings of Henry James—given the 1960s Polanski art-film treatment. More pleasant in tone than Macbeth, but far less watchable, What?, which follows a Tate lookalike as she’s mauled by seemingly every man in sight, finds Polanski returning to the realm of broad-tone deaf comedy, only What?, unlike The Fearless Vampire Killers, is marked by a spiteful ugliness that doesn’t allow for much in the way of audience benefit of the doubt. If Macbeth was a sadistic venture marked by a number of touches of greatness, What? is an ugly movie that also seems to be deliberately bad for the sole purpose of irritating the viewer (the pace is particularly limp and shapeless).

If Macbeth and What? exemplify Polanski’s more questionable impulses and indulgences, the vastly underrated Bitter Moon allows for the healthier side of deliberately screwing with film tone. Emmanuelle Seigner, deeply bland in Polanski’s totally forgettable Harrison Ford thriller Frantic a few years prior to this, has a kinky fembot allure here that’s meant to be sexy and off-putting in about equal measure. Bitter Moon is another Polanski film concerned with sexual politics and delusions, only staged with a playful element of parody (most notably of the work of Henry Miller and of Polanski’s own prior films) that still doesn’t negate the sexiness. Most people seemed to miss the point (you’d think the Vangelis score would suffice as a tip-off), and so the film closed quickly to generally bad reviews, but Bitter Moon has a porny sense of the ludicrous that tempts one to wonder if its creator had, perhaps, actively exorcised a few of his demons.

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The Poet

Everything that has predominately characterized Polanski’s work over the years—the heightened symbolism and camera placement, the doomed romanticism, the fascination with personal and inter-personal corruption, the bitter, violent, obsessive free-form experimentations—inform his finest two films, which both bear the mark of a talented artist reaching a profound epoch.

The first is Death and the Maiden, a film of authentically shocking emotional directness and clarity. Another adaptation of a play (by Ariel Dorfman), as well as another Polanski film set chiefly on one confined set, it’s impossible not to see Death and the Maiden as a reckoning of sorts, perhaps as close as the filmmaker was ready to get at that point to exploring the personal atrocities that he survived as a young Jew on the run from Nazis in Poland. The film is a long stand-off between three characters: Paulina (Sigourney Weaver), a housewife; her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson), an attorney in a prominent unnamed South American country once ruled by a fascist regime; and Miranda (Ben Kingsley), the man who probably raped and tortured Paulina for months during the regime’s rule in an effort to extract information concerning a rebellious newspaper with which Gerardo was a part.

The story’s structure allows for another of Polanski’s sexually tinged power plays that might serve to expose the bitterness and hypocrisies of a number of self-delusional clowns such as those in Cul-de-Sac, except that the filmmaker isn’t having any of that here. This time, we are meant to take these characters seriously, to feel them, and to see them as representatives of us. As Paulina, Weaver gives the finest female performance in a Polanski film; she has a strident, nearly feral, sense of purpose that’s electrifying and quite poignant. Weaver allows you to see Paulina’s feelings of vulnerability and betrayal without softening the frequently terrifying emotional wreckage. Kingsley’s Miranda is almost as heartbreaking, which is a funny thing to say about a character who probably ruined countless women’s lives until it’s made daringly clear that Miranda was just a cog in a machine seduced by the lures of absolute power. (A long, unbroken take of Kingsley’s final monologue is the best filmmaking Polanski had done by this point.)

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But Death and the Maiden, cleansing and shocking as it was, was only a warm-up for The Pianist. The film is cleanly made: Polanski’s direction is as sharp as ever, and the pace is somehow both intensely fast and gruelingly slow (there isn’t a boring or off bit, and yet it feels about five hours long). But the film decidedly isn’t the sort of forgettable human rights-affirming pabulum that always wins so many awards near the holidays, and it manages something I’ve never quite seen: It makes the Holocaust, an event so awful as to be intangible to other generations, real. Polanski, with his deceptively unforced craftsmanship, doesn’t over-emphasize anything, and so the monstrosities pile up with a disturbing, and pointed, lack of emphasis. Polanski recreates what must, to risk cliché, have been a hell on Earth (perhaps the greatest committed to film since Fires on the Plain) and brings you to a place of purifying understanding and empathy that doesn’t shortchange or cheapen the considerable brutality we’ve seen up to that point. The Pianist, a grueling, rigorously human masterwork, finds Polanski, one of the most publicly scrutinized and tortured of artists, in a place of tattered and impermanent grace.

The Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective “Roman Polanski” runs from September 7—30. For more information click here.

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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