|
"The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies." (Poe) A regime change means a reckoning with the past, Chile is not named in the investigations following the fall of the dictatorship. Alone in a cliffside home, the wife (Sigourney Weaver) stabs the roasted fowl and has dinner in a closet, she was once a protester in "the movement" named Lorca. Her husband (Stuart Wilson) is to lead the new democracy's justice committee on atrocities, "to live like suburban idiots" is the dream of normalcy. "The bad old days" when a knock on the door at midnight meant terror, now it's a meek physician (Ben Kingsley) returning a spare tire, immediately recognized by the woman as her torturer and rapist from a decade and a half ago. Bound to a chair and gagged with undies, he faces the traumatized avenger's handgun. "She's mad! She needs therapy!" "You are her therapy." Back to Knife in the Water and Cul-de-Sac for Roman Polanski's concentrated consideration of guilt and memory, an analytical mise en scène perfectly calibrated to Weaver's ferocious sorrow and Kingsley's squirming insinuation. A miniature tribunal in the dark, a call from the President, a future minister petrified. "Of course he just stood there. He's the law." A confession is dictated, traces of doubt persist. "If he's innocent, then he's really fucked." Captor and prisoner in a living room, suddenly bright and loud when power returns after an outage. (The distant speck pulsating in the night is revealed to be a lighthouse as morning comes.) "Crude power and control" admitted at last, man into monster via "morbid curiosity," a rapt monologue on the edge of the precipice. "But it's time for me to reclaim my Schubert..." A bit of bravura camerawork for the coda, from string quartet to audience to balcony and back for a frontal close-up at the concert hall and, as always with Polanski, the dance of predator and prey. Cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli.
--- Fernando F. Croce |