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By PAUL BRENNER
An attractive
nineteen-year-old hitchhiker accepts an invitation
from a self-absorbed Polish bureaucrat and his
beautiful young wife to spend a day sailing with
them on their sailboat, by asking, "You want to go
on with the game?" The man replies, "You're not in
my class kid. But come aboard." And thus begins
Roman Polanski's psycho-sexual allegory about
three people crawling around a sailboat, getting
in each other's way and on each other's nerves.
Polanski's first feature is a brilliant roundelay
of shifting power relationships and his crowded
compositions, with his actors so close they seem
to be falling into the camera lens, conveying the
constricted, stifling atmosphere of human beings
psychologically at each others throats. It is all
that much more brilliantly realized by Polanski in
contrasting the enclosed space compositions on the
sailboat with the invigorating freedom of the
water and the sky in the background. And in this
two-disc Criterion presentation, Polanski's film
is given the treatment it deserves -- as is
usually the case with Criterion, their care with
the films in their catalog is without peer. One
hopes Criterion can given Universal, Fox, Columbia
and Warner some much needed pointers in the
importance of a careful DVD transfer (and I'm not
talking about "Bruce Almighty" here either).
The first disc features the film, a still gallery,
and a fascinating introduction to the film with
Polanski and co-screenwriter Jerzy Skolimowski.
The second disc is devoted to Polanski's
pre-"Knife in the Water" shorts -- "Murder,"
"Teeth Smile," "Break Up the Dance," "Two Men and
a Wardrobe," "The Lamp," "When Angels Fall," "The
Fat and the Lean," Mammals" -- with all the shorts
looking better on this Criterion DVD than they've
been encountered elsewhere.
The shorts themselves are pretentious, much like
the husband on the sailboat. Polanski's shorts
veer from straight-on Beckett homages to crazy
mirror Beckett homages, with a vigorously seasoned
gazpacho of Laurel and Hardy thrown in. In their
heyday these little lumps of highfalutin' "cinema"
were all the rage in cinema studies classes and
their beard-stroking graduate assistants. But now
they are difficult to digest -- at least at one
sitting. |
