Review of Knife in the Water (1962) by Edith N — 05 May 2010

Nothing on a Boat.

Yes, I will be talking about Roman Polanski the man here. I will leave it until later, but there is no way to discuss the man's art at the moment without discussing the man's life. They're so informed by one another that there is no possibility not to. I'm not sure what I've said about him before--I mention him very little in my review of [i]The Pianist[/i]--but right now, things are getting a little heated on the subject. However, the first thing I noticed about him while watching this movie is that he really doesn't seem to know the first thing about boats. At one point, two of the characters go swimming while the person who's never been on a boat before is the last one left on it. Even though they are becalmed, they shouldn't have left the sails up, and they don't appear to have dropped the anchor, either. This gives us some minor wackiness of trying to control/catch the boat, but it mostly just makes everyone concerned seem stupid.

Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and his wife, Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka, dubbed by Anna Ciepielewska), are driving together to a marina, where they plan to spend a couple of days sailing. For reasons which don't even seem to make much sense to them, they pick up a hitchhiker, "Young Boy," who can also be called Knife (Zygmunt Malanowicz, dubbed by Polanski). For further reasons no one understands, they take Knife with them on the boat, even though he's creepy enough that I was waiting for him to stab them, throw them overboard, and steal the boat. They work on teaching him how to sail, and things generally happen. Both men like Krystyna and deeply dislike each other. And I have to say, I agree with both of them. Really, most of what you get is the two men circling around one another in suspicion. Andrzej is a pompous git, and Kinfe seems to be working on scaring people because he gets off on the power he feels it gives him. So yeah.

There is a lot of mood to this movie. It's heavy on the mood. It seems unlikely that Polanski, in Poland, had the chance to see [i]The African Queen[/i], but there's a scene of pulling the boat through reeds that evokes it quite strongly. Parts of the movie take place in the cramped interior of the hold, and somehow, Polanski makes even some scenes under the open sky and on the open water look claustrophobic, or perhaps it's agoraphobia--it's too open. What happens almost doesn't matter. I don't know if Polanski is quite trying to make Knife as ominous as he is, but given the mood, it seems likely. What happens almost seems inevitable from the moment Andrzej nearly runs Knife over in the road; at first, I think he's just a tool in an argument with Krystyna, and why he continues beyond that seems basically to be so there's a movie to hang the mood on. In that, the movie is kind of disappointing; there's no payoff to the suspense.

And then there's Polanski himself. Let's talk about him for a minute. He needs to come back and face the rule of law. The fact that he assuredly would have been out by now is a silly argument; he served somewhat over a month in a psychiatric facility, and that doesn't really count as serving time to me. The fact that the girl, now long since woman, wants it dropped doesn't matter; after all, abused spouses and other rape victims often want things dropped, too. As to the bias of the judge, well, the system has safeguards to handle that. And, yes, the man had, up to that point, a horrible life. Being born a Jew in 1933 Europe does not, in general, end well for people. We have also talked, before, about his beautiful wife and her fate, along with that of their unborn child. It's horrible, and no one should have had to have lived through all that. Doubtless, he needed a great deal of therapy. Probably he still does. But you know, so what? By the woman's account, what he did to her was pretty horrific, and she was thirteen at the time. The idea that he wouldn't serve jail time for that seems to me a miscarriage of justice, and he needs to face the music on it.

Polanski's career will ever be coloured by his life. He's not unique in that, but for directors, it's relatively rare. No one much cares what Hitchcock did at home. Tim Burton's relationship matters to us because he casts his significant other in a lot of his movies. We care a great deal about actors' lives, it seems, but mostly, we leave directors alone. It's the people we see who matter, and Roman Polanski and the other directors hide behind the camera and are seen only by their way of creating images. You have to do something pretty shocking in order to have the general public notice you, if you're a writer or director or what have you. Polanski's legacy will ever be coloured by what he did that night in 1977. People who try to separate the two are working nobly at a failed effort. The Academy, in one of its more oddly unbiased moments, gave the man an Oscar he couldn't come into the country to accept without having to face his sentence. The art is often quite good. The man, not so much.