UK/France/USA
4*
Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Rafael Yglesias
Ariel Dorfman
Director of Photography:
Tonino Delli Colli
Running time: 102 minutes
Roman Polanski’s career as a filmmaker will always be best remembered for Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, but his underrated Death and the Maiden is a stunning film, in large part thanks to the work of Ariel Dorfman, on whose play it is based.
The film is set in an unnamed country in South America “after the fall of the dictatorship”. This could be any number of countries, and since Dorfman has Chilean origins one would expect the country to be Chile and the dictator to be Pinochet, but even if this were true, it has no real bearing on our interpretation of the film. Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver) and her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) are living in near isolation, and she becomes tense every time a strange car pulls up to their house. On the radio, Paulina hears that Gerardo has been appointed the new head of the government’s tribunal that will look into human rights abuses during under the former military junta. However, she remains unconvinced that the guilty individuals will be made to pay sufficiently for what they did.
It is a stormy night, and the power goes out. So, too, do the phone lines. Gerardo is brought back home by a friendly stranger after his car had got a flat tyre. Later in the evening, the friendly stranger appears again: Gerardo had forgotten to take his spare tyre. The friendly stranger makes some very flattering comments about Gerardo and his role in the upcoming investigations, and Gerardo asks the man in to have a drink with him. Hearing the two of them, Paulina flees from the house. In the man’s car, she finds a cassette of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet and decides to push the car down a cliff into the rough seas.
All of this might sound rather odd, but the thrust of Paulina’s mental processes is soon revealed when she goes back to her and Gerardo’s house, ties up the stranger, who is called Dr Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley), and accuses him of having raped her several times, while the Schubert Quartet was playing in the background, during her time as a political prisoner. She was always blindfolded, but she claims to recognise Miranda’s voice, his smell, the expressions he uses, his quotations from Nietzsche and, most importantly, his love of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”.
These three characters – Paulina, Gerardo and Dr Miranda – are the only people we ever see in the film, except for a prologue and an epilogue in a concert hall, where the title piece is performed. The actors’ performances are all very strong and make the film a wholly dramatic experience.
Viewers will vacillate between trust and distrust in Paulina’s assessment of Miranda’s guilt. Is Paulina, who has clearly been emotionally and mentally affected by her ordeal more than a decade ago, someone whom we can trust? Or is she just out for revenge? Even in the film’s climactic scene (an amazing piece of acting: nearly three minutes in close-up), things are not as clear-cut as they seem to be, making this journey towards the truth so much darker, because we have to decide for ourselves whether we have not been deceived one last time.
The strength of Death and the Maiden lies in the screenwriters’ ability to keep us guessing throughout, while still maintaining absolute control over the credibility of the admittedly theatrical world we see before us. Almost the entire film is set in the Escobars’ house (clearly in a studio), but the camera work by Tonino Delli Colli and the editing by Hervé de Luze create the necessary tension in concert with the actors’ performances. One minor weakness is the house’s lighting: Although the power is supposed to be out, every inch of the house’s interior is lit, and when characters throw five shadows, you know things are a bit fake.