Polanski's cinema of pain

tieman64

The most remarkable thing about "Death and the Maiden" is the house in which director Roman Polanski's story takes place. Perched on a cliff and overlooking a perpetually stormy ocean, it's the kind of dank, dark and vulnerable home that typifies Polanski's cinema.

Polanski has a way of creating images that seem to already reside in your subconscious. Steeped in a sort of Slavic/European mode of storytelling, he taps into a seemingly primal data bank of images. Think the Nosferatu like Fagin in "Oliver Twist", or the hooked nosed Jewish caricatures in "Vampire Killers", or the moustached Spanish twins in "9th Gate".

"Death and the Maiden" is a simple tale in which a husband and wife (Sigourney Weaver) are disturbed one night when an odd man (played by Ben Kingsley) turns up on their doorstep.

Sigourney immediately recognises the man as the deranged professor who repeatedly raped her many years ago. In a fit of anger she knocks this monster unconscious, ties him to a chair and proceeds to abuse and torture him. She will release him, she says, if he confesses to her abuse. At the end of the film he confesses, and she upholds her bargain and sets him free.

Polanski's film predates torture films such as "Saw", "Hard Candy" and "Captivity" by almost a full decade. But unlike its pornographic imitators, it also manages to raise several timely questions.

Until the final act, and even then, we never know whether Signorney is crazy or correct in her assessment of the Ben Kingsley character. Is Kingsley a rapist or is he a simple old man? When he confesses to the rape, is he doing so because he is guilty or because he wants to be freed? The film's point is essentially something that the US military has not yet learnt. Torture doesn't work. It merely starts a cycle of animosity, the victim forced to confess to acts he did not do. He's damned if he tells the truth and damned if he lies. He tells you the truth and you punish him until he lies. He tells you the lie, and is punished for doing so.

Of course that's if you have the wrong person. But the film's point is that you never know exactly who you have. Otherewise, there's no need for torture.

The film is also, once again, Polanski wrestling with personal demons. In 1968, Polanski's wife Sharon Tate was tortured and murdered by cult members. Years later, Polanski himself was accused of sexually abusing Samantha Geimer, a 13 year old girl. Both events have directly influenced, or at least coloured, the director's subsequent output.

Think "Tess", in which an adult man abuses his power over a juvenile girl, "Ghost", in which a man hides from international justice, "Macbeth", in which Polanski's vents blood and tragedy on screen, "Frantic", in which a man loses his wife (here Polanski stages himself as victim, whilst damning those who condemn him), "Bitter Moon", in which a man and girl oscillate between dominance and submission, and "Death and the Maiden", in which a molested woman (who becomes both Tate and Geimer) confronts and forgives her abuser

Films like "Oliver Twist", "The Pianist", and to a lesser extent "Ghost Writer", seem to be based on a different kind of pain. A different kind of artistic exorcism. In a sense, these films are all about the scars of the Holocaust, and the horrors witnessed by a young boy who came of age in war torn Europe. Here, young Oliver becomes a lost and wandering Polanski, while Dickens' London becomes the Nazi infested streets of Poland.

But there is a far darker thread running throughout Polanski's filmography. That of the victim (Polanski) internalizing both hate and his forced submissiveness (suffered at the hands of the Nazis, of his audience, of the American Legal system etc) and redirecting them against his own victims (Samantha Geimer, his heroines, the US etc). Polanski forever casts himself as both victim and abuser, his filmography nothing less than a vicious cycle of abuse.

7.9/10 - A minor work, at times powerful.

Worth one viewing.

score /10

tieman64 20 November 2007

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1767172/