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The cruel lunar vision is shared from the window of a departing plane, before that there's the churning ocean framed through the iris-shot of a porthole. Cinema is an art of deceiving and over-sharing, says Roman Polanski, his demonstration unfolds aboard an Istanbul-bound luxury liner, "an amusement on a boring voyage." Tale of the American hack (Peter Coyote) who yearns to be a new Hemingway and becomes a withered Scheherazade instead, the bodacious dancer (Emmanuelle Seigner) materializes gliding in the back of a Parisian bus. Folie de passion, a tangle of sweaty flesh and ripe prose, "I might have been Adam with the taste of apple fresh in my mouth." (Cream milk and George Michael's "Faith" comprise a characteristic composition, with a capper from Tashlin.) Desire into ennui into contempt, "it's no fun hurting someone who means nothing to you." The audience is a disgusted-beguiled Brit (Hugh Grant) on a second honeymoon with the reserved missus (Kristin Scott Thomas). "Steady on, old boy." Polanski founds all of this on Renoir's The Woman on the Beach, the broken storyteller and the hardened muse who deserve each other, his nakedest film. Kink makes for a fading palliative but viciousness can forge a lasting bond, hands reaching out lyrically on a carousel return for a crippling yank at the hospital. (Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark informs the car accident, the wheelchair reversal adduces Ophüls' Le Plaisir.) The crushed frump in the "Kiss the Cook" apron remakes herself as a vengeful vixen, the fatuous tormenter is reborn as a little boy shivering in the bathtub. "Every relationship, no matter how harmonious, contains seeds of farce, tragedy." A long piss on the "erotic thriller," a swaying camera on a New Year's Eve party, a bilious sublimity throughout. The mock-moralist coda is taken up by Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut. With Victor Banerjee, Luca Vellani, Boris Bergman, and Stockard Channing.
--- Fernando F. Croce |