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The sailboat is the ideal setting for the sardonic worldview (one-upmanship surrounded by an undulating void), Roman Polanski is certainly the cunning hellion playing on the deck with a blade ("I've got a delicate touch"). A disinterested kiss is enough to take the couple's emotional temperature, he (Leon Niemczyk) takes over the wheel en route to the lake, she (Jolanta Umecka) remains blank but for a curled smile of irony. The young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) completes the composition, the weekend on a boat is an insinuating exploration of Antonioni's nautical lenses in L'Avventura. The subtly phallocentric competition pits the bourgeois novelist's smoking pipe against the carefree wanderer's knife—the skipper's compass doesn't impress the sailor, a bikini-clad figure splashes amusedly in the background between the two. "You want to go on with the game." Status symbols, petty maneuvers amid vast spaces, Dad and Junior vying for Mom's attention. (An overhead view from the mast frames a sunbathing Malanowicz with outstretched limbs and a coiled-rope halo, cavorting on an invisible cross.) Rain sends the trio down to the cabin, where Polanski's close studies of Welles and the power plays of Jerzy Skolimowski's screenplay take off. One arrangement has the husband fiddling with a radio and the hitchhiker trying to catch a fly while the wife undresses, crystalline long takes surveying a poem and a song ("We're out of words and moons and stars, there's no tenderness in us...") during a round of jackstraws. Circles and triangles in a great, brackish anecdote about the instability of human interactions, with power ultimately belonging to the woman who sees through the pose of the louts around her but embraces seduction anyway. "Been an instructive trip, eh?" The concluding image at the crossroads offers admission of guilt on one side and acceptance of cuckoldry on the other (cf. Chabrol's La Femme Infidèle). Cinematography by Jerzy Lipman. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |