Roman Polanski

Carnage (2011)

André Crous

Based on the Yasmina Reza’s play, Roman Polanski’s Carnage tightens the screws when two couples sit around the coffee table.

CarnageFrance
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Yasmina Reza
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 75 minutes

The main premise of Roman Polanski’s Carnage is to have two couples stuck in an apartment, unable to leave because of the hosts’ social obligation to offer their guests more coffee and cobbler, the guests’ obligation to indulge their hosts by accepting said offers, and above all, the collective obligation to keep smiling despite a shared desire to skip forward in time. Social commentary forms an important layer of this 75-minute film, though the most interesting aspect is the way in which the confined spaces of a New York apartment – of which we see the lounge area almost exclusively – can serve as a pressure cooker for the frustrated emotions of four seemingly level-headed individuals.

In the very first scene, which takes place in New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, there is an altercation between two teenage boys symmetrically framed by big trees on either side. Visually wedged in the middle of the shot, one boy swings a stick and hits the other in the face, leaving him visibly injured.

In the subsequent scene, the parents of the two boys are in front of the computer, typing out a carefully worded statement that seeks to establish the facts (one boy’s teeth were knocked out) without offending either party. The parents of the alleged victim invite the parents of the alleged aggressor to their apartment to figure out how to proceed.

They all walk on eggshells, scared of being perceived as aggressive, for that would reflect on their children’s roles in the fight, but equally scared of being perceived as weak, for the same conclusion could be drawn just as easily. These people, acutely aware of the meaning of reputation, suddenly find themselves embroiled in a story of teenage aggression and need to find a solution.

But in twists that oscillate between purposefully frustrating and hilarious, and despite simmering tension and mutual contempt, the two couples, as a result of common civility, find themselves unable to leave the apartment. The setup is more realistic than, say, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which guests at a dinner party can’t leave and ultimately eat themselves to death, but such thoughts couldn’t have been far from the dark mind of Polanski.

Carnage depends heavily not just on the sharpness of the dialogue but also on the delivery by the four actors. In this respect, it is a very successful ensemble piece, pairing the slightly reserved Jodie Foster with the garrulous John C. Reilly, and the very uptight Kate Winslet with the snotty Christoph Waltz.

Based on a play by Yasmina Reza called God of Carnage, Polanski’s film is about the way dialogue can be wielded to gently do away with belaboured niceties. All that is required is some time and an airtight lid. It becomes obvious how laughter is used to alleviate moments of social uncertainty, though laughter itself can easily turn awkward, leading to a vicious circle of self-inflicted torture.

Ultimately, this Gordian knot of awkwardness is cut in a way that is greatly satisfying, though it comes at some personal and professional cost to Waltz’s loudmouthed character, whose devil-may-care attitude generates the most laughs by far and allows the actor to channel some of his Inglourious Basterds persona.

It is fascinating to watch the cracks appear in the formal pairings of the couples and alliances shift to give the characters the illusion they are not weak, although much dirty laundry is aired in the process of re-establishing a zone of social comfort.

As opposed to David Fincher’s Panic Room, in which Foster also starred, or Polanski’s own Death and the Maiden, both of which took place in one location, Carnage lacks a central animating force, some big goal, and the viewer has no real narrative expectation. There is much verbal mudslinging and even a few moments of physical conflict, but the conversations go off on multiple tangents, and after an hour, the whole muddle becomes a bit draining.

Luckily, Polanski doesn’t outstay his welcome, and when the conversation runs dry, the film simply ends. Carnage has a great deal of the explosive potential that its title suggests, featuring generous performances by its four main players. Unfortunately, the plot is too thin to make this a truly great piece of work.

An Officer and a Spy (2019)

André Crous

Roman Polanski’s simplistic portrayal of the historic Dreyfus trial makes An Officer and a Spy a rather lifeless affair.

An Officer and a SpyFrance
3*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Robert Harris
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: J’accuse

Non-Jews often prefer to think of antisemitism as something that began and immediately peaked under the Nazis. That is a simplification of history that would border on baloney if it wasn’t so tragically uninformed. While history offers countless counterexamples, the two most notorious trials involving innocent Jews took place within just five years of each other: Leopold Hilsner (1899/1900), accused and convicted of two murders, and Alfred Dreyfus (1894), twice convicted of treason. In both cases, a man’s alleged culpability was supported by a passionate wave of antisemites frothing at the mouth for a conviction rather than actual facts. The story of Hilsner, a native Czech in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sadly remains untold on the big screen. Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy recounts the fallout of Dreyfus’s trial and, ultimately, his quasi-exoneration.

We meet Dreyfus on the worst day of his life. On 5 January 1895, he is stripped of his rank in front of his fellow soldiers. It amounts to a public humiliation ceremony. Born and raised in France, he had joined the military as a young man. Towards the end of the 19th century, he registered at the prestigious War College, where he was an outstanding student. Then came the accusations that he had shared state secrets with the German Empire. Handwritten notes were produced as evidence, and he was found guilty. His sentence was lifelong solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, offshore from French Guiana, where even the guards were not allowed to speak to him.

One of his former teachers at the War College, Georges Picquart, gets a promotion to lead the “Statistical Section”, which is really the counter-espionage service. This section had been responsible for collecting (rather, creating) the damning evidence that established Dreyfus’s guilt during the trial. Full of purpose and moral clarity, Picquart seeks to shake up the dusty bureaucracy immediately. When he learns that one of his officers regularly receives intelligence from the German Embassy passed on by the cleaning lady, he decides to do the pick-up himself, despite having no intelligence-gathering experience whatsoever. That night’s pick-up produces incriminating snippets of paper that quickly lead him to suspect a French officer of being a spy for the Germans. And it isn’t long before the officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, is revealed to be the real culprit in the affair that convicted Dreyfus.

Under Polanski’s direction, evidence simply falls into Picquart’s hands on countless occasions. Whatever avenue he pursues is always the right one and leads him on a straight path to crucial evidence that proves his intuition correct. It is to be expected that a screenplay based on real events will simplify life’s messiness for the viewer. But the facile jumping from one point to the next here cannot be exciting to the viewer because it all feels totally contrived. In addition, the army’s top brass are antisemitic across the board, and none of them appears to harbour any doubt whatsoever about the cover-ups and forgeries that sent Dreyfus to prison. Except for Picquart, no one wants to track down the real criminal, which is mind-blowing and not particularly convincing.

It becomes clear that the army really targeted Dreyfus for the crime of, in today’s parlance, “breathing while Jewish”. The xenophobia among the powerful is evident and unabating. In an early scene, Picquart’s predecessor, Lt. Col. Sandherr, is shown bedridden with syphilis, whining about how outsiders have invaded the motherland. “When I see so many foreigners around me, I notice the degeneration of moral and artistic values. I realise that I no longer recognise France. [Please protect] what’s left of the country!” he pleads with Picquart. But this moment, which finds a strong echo in the current resurgence of nationalism, is left undeveloped. Polanski also fails to detail how the Dreyfus affair exacerbated feelings of Christian Gallic pride among the general population.

But Picquart goes it alone, persevering despite his inherent antisemitism, driven by a desire for justice. He carries out his investigation without the help of anyone else in his intelligence office. No amount of pushback from the generals above him can douse his passion for the truth, and no one intimidates him. These might be admirable characteristics in a man, but we do not see him emotionally tested. Everything always works out. By the time all sense of justice seems lost, he suddenly meets not only Deputy (and future Prime Minister) Georges Clemenceau but also revered novelist of the working class, Émile Zola. Within days, Zola’s famous newspaper article, “J’accuse!”, lays into every powerful individual involved in the Dreyfus conspiracy. And thus begins the final legal brawl.

But despite France being a colonial power, the scenes in court, openly biased in favour of the military, paint the country as little more than a banana republic. What should be the most intense part of the film is staged and edited together as a comedy.

Jean Dujardin stars as Picquart, but despite his amiable demeanour, the character doesn’t undergo any change – a point strikingly made in the film’s final scene. An unrecognisable Louis Garrel plays Dreyfus, whose lack of presence in the film makes him a peripheral character in his own story. But in the scenes where he does appear, he responds to the constant humiliation with brave stoicism that sometimes cracks under the pressure of boiling anger. In other words, like a real human being.

It is well established that in 1977, a 43-year-old Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, later identified as Samantha Gailey. He admitted to this in court. So, while he has said explicitly that he understands Dreyfus’s persecution, their cases are in no way the same. Dreyfus was innocent and was framed because he was Jewish. Polanski was and is still guilty because he committed a criminal act. In this regard, his being Jewish is about as relevant as his being 5’5″. If the director really wanted to make a film about his alleged innocence (despite pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor), let him stage a re-enactment of his starring role in the vile 1977 rape. 

But there is no connective tissue whatsoever between An Officer and a Spy and Polanski. The film isn’t good or bad because of his personal life. It is just mediocre because he couldn’t be bothered to imbue it with the authentic messiness of life.

Venus in Fur (2013)

André Crous

Venus in Fur is a two-character, single-location film by Roman Polanski that is delicious, sexy and gripping.

Venus in FurFrance
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
David Ives
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: La Vénus à la fourrure

The term “masochism”, which refers to the feeling of excitement some people get from being hurt, abused or degraded, comes from the surname of the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose Venus in Furs (Venus im Pelz), published in 1869, revolved around a man who willingly lets himself be dominated by the woman of his desires.

The novel has been adapted for the big screen at least five times before and is the source material for Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, which ignores the side plots and focuses like a laser on the central couple. Besides having only two characters, the master filmmaker has gone for even more minimalism by setting the action in a single location, a theatre.

It is the kind of setup Polanski knows well from another film he made, Carnage, which saw four characters stuck in an apartment, determined to solve the problem of the one couple’s son having beaten up the son of the other. Both Carnage and Venus are tightly wound pieces that rely on powerful acting and subtle shifts in the power balance to hold our attention instead of the camera.

Venus in Fur is set inside a small, rather rundown theatre in Paris, where a middle-aged theatre director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is holding auditions for his upcoming play – of course, based on Sacher-Masoch’s book. He is desperate, having seen too many actresses who have absolutely no grasp of the main character and is about to leave when in stumbles Wanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), who is wet to the bone; however, the rainstorm outside hasn’t doused her garrulousness in the least, and Thomas wants to get this chatty, slightly overbearing (or intimidating?) woman out of his sight as quickly as possible.

She has her ways to break down his defences, however, and it is only a matter of time before they end up on stage, with Wanda (also – coincidentally? – the name of the main character in the play) gently wresting control from the director after she impresses him with her interpretation of the role.

Films that take place in a single setting are few and far between. The best-known examples are probably Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, both of which starred at least a dozen different characters whose interactions we could follow, which made the director’s job very easy when it came to keeping the viewer interested.

But those two films were from 1957 and 1947, respectively. An equivalent may be found in one of Ingmar Bergman’s last films, After the Rehearsal, from 1984, which is also set in a single space, and moreover takes place on the stage of a theatre and only has a total cast of five. There are a few other examples of note (such as Richard Linklater’s Tape, the overlooked but tense Buried and the modern-day triumph starring Robert Redford, All is Lost). However, this kind of self-imposed minimalism is something directors tend to avoid because the setup doesn’t showcase their dazzling use of the camera or innovative editing or control of a crowd of extras.

It takes an individual with a certain kind of talent to film what is essentially a theatre piece and make it come alive despite the obvious limitations. Polanski, who co-wrote the screenplay with David Ives, infuses his story with sexual tension, comedy and the word that keeps popping up in Thomas’ vocabulary, “ambiguity.” (Wanda keeps confusing it with ambivalence, and with good reason.)

The sexual tension is expected, but the film really earns our admiration through its comedy. Look how the ring tone of Thomas’ mobile phone references Wagner (definitely not a good omen), or the jacket Wanda pulls out of her bag is not only historically accurate but fits Thomas like a glove. This may not sound like comedy, but the actors let the moments sink in just long enough to thoroughly enchant us.

Despite our better judgement, we are constantly aligned with Thomas in the position of victim. We know this Wanda is up to no good, but Polanski’s camera always returns to a spot at the same level as Thomas, who seems to be getting ever more enjoyment out of her game of domination. In terms of content, there is not much going on here – Wanda seems to be omniscient and always in control, and she displays no real signs of character development – but the mystery of who she is very effectively animates the film throughout its 90-minute running time.

Polanski cleverly elides the space between the worlds of the film and that of the text, either by having Wanda respond in character to a question posed by Thomas (rather than the play’s Severin), inserting the name “Thomas” in the play, or even adding sound effects to give invisible objects a measure of existence, exactly as Lars von Trier did in Dogville.

Although we are captivated by the two characters, whoever they are, there are one or two big jumps that spoil the film and seem to come from nowhere. The first takes place right at the beginning when a misunderstanding leads to Wanda taking to the stage and Thomas simply yielding to her brazen informality. The other happens at the end when we are asked to believe Thomas has surrendered his sanity to the point where he would give up everything for a moment longer with his crazy actress.

More bizarre moments follow, and the film ends with some strong, dramatic catharsis that is both powerful and hilarious, answering some of our questions without removing all the ambiguity about Wanda’s identity.

Venus in Fur is a highly entertaining film that, although not as strong or as entertaining as Carnage, proves Polanski’s skills as one who can manipulate his audience’s emotions. Even while he deals with a story as intimate as that of two individuals vying for power, he deftly draws us in with a laugh here and a lingering question there.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

André Crous

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature film as director, Quentin Tarantino reminds us that even when movies are based on very real events, their stories are in the hands of the filmmaker.

Once Upon a Time in HollywoodUSA
4*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 160 minutes

At the end of his Second World War drama and perhaps his greatest film, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino did something shocking: He recast history to give us the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in a movie theatre in 1944. While the viewer often suspends disbelief to follow the story of fictional characters in a recognisable historical setting, there tends to be an assumption that the main events will remain, in large part, intact and unaltered. But Tarantino says (correctly) that the filmmaker is in control of his or her depiction of history: Since a representation is already separate from the original, why not go even further and rewrite history for the purpose of entertainment, especially when there is no risk that anyone would mistake the film for actual history?

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature in the director’s chair, Tarantino is his revisionist self again: He tells a wholly fictional story within a recognisable context (Hollywood in 1969) with all the meticulous attention we would expect from David Fincher before reminding us that he can change the facts of history because the real world is only applicable to the extent he wants it to be. Many of the characters are very close to their real-life counterparts, but only up to a point. And in the tension between real life and representation lies the possibility to create great art.

Released exactly 50 years after the tumultuous year it depicts, Tarantino’s film is set in Tinseltown of the late 1960s, where we find the curious combination of a yearning for the innocence of yore, the hippy rebellion against the status quo and an invisible sword of Damocles hanging over it all because Hollywood in 1969 means only one name: Sharon Tate. Tate, an up-and-coming 20-something actress, had married Polish director Roman Polanski the previous year, a few months before the release of one of the highlights of his career, the classic Rosemary’s Baby. A little more than a year later, eight months into her pregnancy, she and three of her friends were slaughtered by followers of Charles Manson.

Sharon Tate is played by Margot Robbie in Tarantino’s film, but the real Sharon Tate does show up onscreen when Robbie’s Tate goes to watch The Wrecking Crew at the cinema, and we see Robbie as Tate watching the real Tate play an awkward Danish blonde named Freya Carlson. And yet, while many viewers might notice these are technically different people, the entire setup is clearly one of make-believe, so the suspension of disbelief holds. What has been more controversial, however, is the clear divergence from historical fact at the film’s climax, even though the entire film is, by definition, covered by a “This is fiction” disclaimer.

So, what is this fiction all about? Despite all this talk about Tate, the film is actually primarily interested in her next-door neighbour on Cielo Drive: a former cowboy television star named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose friendship with his long-time stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), is by far the most intimate he ever allows himself to get with another human being. Missouri-born Rick’s career has gone downhill since his starring turn in Bounty Law in the 1950s, and he is scared of having to pack up his bags and say goodbye to Hollywood. But Cliff, who lives with his pit bull, Brandy, in a caravan next to a drive-in, is always available as his driver, a shoulder to cry on and a constant companion through thick and thin.

The plot, most of which unfolds over two days (one in February, the other in August), follows Rick and Cliff, together and separately, as well as Sharon, who spends most of her day at the cinema watching herself. Rick, who has all but given up on himself, meets a child actress (although she refers to herself as an “actor“) who will change his life. Meanwhile, Cliff gives a young hippie a lift to Spahn Ranch, where mistrust hangs thick in the air. At the ranch, peopled almost exclusively by young white girls, Cliff seeks out an old friend, the owner, George Spahn (Bruce Dern), who has gone blind since Cliff last filmed on the ranch and has shacked up with the most domineering girl in the group.

DiCaprio and Pitt both give some of their best performances ever here. DiCaprio, whose appearance is still strikingly boyish more than two decades after Titanic, conveys the sentiment of being an outsider very well simply by showing up. His character goes through multiple ups and downs, and we can always see the gears grinding behind his eyes during his silences. Pitt, by contrast, is the epitome of cool and easily outshines the character of Steve McQueen, who makes a brief appearance in a very unnecessary late-night party scene at the Playboy Mansion. Channelling the energy (and still sporting the looks) of a man half his age, he is kind to everyone but is not beyond striking a very hard blow, as we find out in a memorable interaction with Bruce Lee and a hilarious flashback with his former wife, whose demise he is very likely responsible for.

A major improvement on Tarantino’s previous film, The Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood gives itself space to breathe but never meanders. Two of the longest scenes – the one at Spahn Ranch and the wholly immersive production of the television show Lancer, in which the dialogue and the actions run almost indefinitely, without cuts or camera changes – have very good reasons for being there, albeit in retrospect. Spahn Ranch upends our expectations and introduces us to some very important characters, while Lancer marks a major turning point in Rick’s perception of his own potential.

But ultimately, after more than two and a half hours of leisurely comedic drama, most people will only talk about the ending. Those who know the story of the Tate/Manson murders will have a sickening feeling towards the end of the film when we see the eight-month-pregnant Sharon Tate and it appears Tarantino is about to shift from the leisurely fifth gear out on the highway right into first gear. But then, the director intervenes like God to give us a rousing version of history instead. In fact, knowing what really happened to Tate makes the events of the film, by comparison, all the more exhilarating, just as Tarantino had done with Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. He doesn’t skimp on the violence but directs it elsewhere and even borrows a flamethrower from his Second World War masterpiece for added showmanship.

The final moments include one of the most acute examples of dramatic irony imaginable, as Jay Sebring, unaware that in a parallel universe (i.e. the real world) he has just been brutally shot and stabbed in a bloodbath, invites Rick over to Sharon’s house after the Manson trio has been taken away by the police. He has no idea what happened to his counterpart in the real world. But we know. And this discrepancy between the real and the fictional is particularly poignant because, in a sense, these characters are real to us, and the fictional murderers have gotten what was coming to them. When they are killed, we feel like they are punished not only for attacking Rick and Cliff but also for murdering the real Tate and her friends.

It is unfortunate, however, that the film does not make the connection with real life more concrete. While he appears on one occasion, Charles Manson’s name is all but left out altogether (his followers refer to him as “Charlie”, but he is never seen in their company). But perhaps Tarantino wanted his film to exist more in the world of make-believe than as a representation of history, which is why an infrequent and incongruous narration (by Kurt Russell, who plays a minor character here) pops up on the soundtrack.

To take the term used by André Bazin, a representation is always at best an “asymptote of reality” and never reality itself. So much focus has been on the closeness of those two lines as the film draws to a close, but few have extolled the artistic tension that results from that intimacy. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood would have been entertaining enough without the last 30 minutes, but what happens there reaffirms its director’s capacity to amaze us.

Death and the Maiden (1994)

André Crous

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.