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KNIFE
IN THE WATER
7/10
Noz
w wodzie : Poland 1962 : Roman POLANSKI : 94 mins
A feuding
couple - fortyish-but-virile sportswriter Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and
his younger wife Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka) are heading to a lakeside marina
for a long day's yachting. En route, they pick up a reckless young hitch-hiker
(Zygmunt Malanowicz) who joins them on the lake. The hitch-hiker proves
a less than competent sailor, despite Andrzej's attempts to (literally)
show him the ropes. As the hours pass, unspoken tensions between the men
- generational, class, sexual - slowly approach breaking-point.
After a handful
of acclaimed shorts, Polanski burst onto the world cinema scene with this
debut feature. Nominated for the Foreign Language Oscar, it paved the
way for his departure to Britain where he made two more black-and-white
films: Repulsion (1965) and Cul
de Sac (1966). Like those pair, Knife in the Water is deliberately
abrasive - as their unwelcoming titles suggest, Polanski is out to challenge
rather than pander to audience expectations. The aim is to keep us on
edge, never allowing us to settle into a cosy film-watching mode.
In each instance,
the narrative and geographical focus is remarkably tight: most of Repulsion
takes place within a single London flat; Cul de Sac seldom
ventures beyond the confines of Holy Island; the drama of Knife in
the Water unfolds on a small yacht. And the main characters generally
don't respond well to this confinement - Repulsion's isolated Catherine
Deneuve quickly loses her grasp on reality; the fragile marriage of Cul
de Sac's Donald Pleasance and Francoise Dorleac shatters when their
territory is invaded by hostile gangster Lionel Stander.
Similarly,
Knife in the Water plays out as a terse infidelity-nightmare, with
Andrzej and Krystyna constantly hovering on the brink of an all-out row:
a simmering dysfunction which the Young Man's presence eventually brings
to a head. Though moments of black comedy are to be found in all three
films - Cul de Sac especially - these are not, on the whole, comfortable
experiences for the viewer.
With Knife
in the Water, however, Polanski and his screenwriting collaborators
(Jakub Goldberg, Jerzy Skolimowski) take this discomfort a little too
far. The three characters - and we never see anyone else - are
annoying to various degrees: an annoyance is felt just as keenly by the
viewer as it is by the characters themselves. A further level of irritation
is added by Krzysztof Komeda's gratingly repetitive, incongruously jazzy
score - which often (deliberately) seems to belong to a different film
altogether.
And although
north-east Poland's expansive Mazury Lakes provide a striking natural
backdrop for Jerzy Lipman's (often hand-held) cinematography, light-levels
are invariably either too bright (in the open-water daylight) or too dark
(in the early-morning, nocturnal or dusk scenes) for them to constitute
anything approaching a conventional idea of the 'picturesque'. (The contrast-levels
also play havoc with the English subtitles on many prints - they're near-illegibly
white-on-white, a problem which thankfully doesn't occur on the subtitling
for versions shown on TV and released on video and DVD.)
In addition,
attentive viewers may notice something 'off' about the dialogue: Umecka
and Malanowicz's lines were in fact dubbed by other performers: Umecka
by Anna Ciepielewska and Malanowicz by none other than Polanski, who had
initially hoped to play the role of the disruptive, immature hitch-hiker
himself. And Umecka isn't exactly the most expressive of performers -
she reportedly wasn't a professional actress at all, and at one stage
Polanski had to have an aide fire off a flare in order to stimulate a
certain reaction from his star (who from certain angles bears a distracting
resemblance to Natalie Wood, herself the victim of a yacht-trip drowning).
The script,
meanwhile, also takes care to avoid conventional dramatic development:
the sombre mood with its undertones of violence and hostility seems to
point towards a tragic conclusion - indeed, at various points it appears
that first Andrzej and then the hitch-hiker have drowned. But nothing
plays out quite as we expect: the final shot conveys, if anything, a sense
of depressing, Beckettian stasis, with the characters trapped in a moral
cul-de-sac, stewing in their own repulsion.
The cumulative
effect is undeniably stimulating, but also very off-putting: this is a
film to be respected and admired, rather than liked or enjoyed: see Philip
Noyce's 1990 ocean-faring three-handed Dead Calm for a more conventionally
satisfying multiplex-oriented variation on this theme. Knife in the
Water, squarely aimed at the arthouses of its time, represents
an impressive calling-card from the then-27-year-old Polanski - who clearly
lacked for nothing in the ambition department. Making any kind of film
on water is always a nightmarish experience for a director, and here Polanski
was also clearly operating on a restricted budget, and under less-than-perfect
weather conditions - presumably the script was rewritten 'on the hoof'
to accommodate any sudden change in the elements. It's telling that Polanski
identified more with the hitch-hiker than with the older, more experienced
Andrzej : for both character and director, the yacht is the setting for
a learning-curve that's steep, often painful, but ultimately highly productive.
3rd June,
2004
(seen 31st May : Tyneside
Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne : public show [BFI re-issue])
by Neil
Young
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