La Ronde

Shadowplayer Alex Livingstone’s remark about the repetition of a moment in CHINATOWN — Faye Dunaway’s forehead hitting her car horn, played first as farce, then as tragedy — got me thinking about repetitions and circularity in Polanski’s work, something I’ve long been super-conscious of.

THE GHOST WRITER begins and ends with the off-screen assassination of a bothersome biographer, but this addiction to the ouroboros narrative that swallows itself is far from a new thing. Let’s attempt a list, and see if that’s boring.

The shorts — some of these are maybe two short for a circular structure to apply (2007’s CINEMA EROTIQUE unfolds entirely in a single cinema auditorium), but three of the major ones establish the pattern — TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE begins with the titular removal men emerging from the sea, and ends with them removing themselves back to it, sad aquatic angels who have visited our Earth and found it uncongenial. MAMMALS and THE FAT AND THE LEAN play like political parables, with the oppressed and the oppressor changing places through revolution, and the whole thing starting again. Since Polanski escaped Nazism only to find himself swallowed by communism, such a philosophy seems understandable, and it lurks behind many of the subsequent story-loops.

KNIFE IN THE WATER — been too long since I’ve seen this one, but doesn’t it begin and end on a road to/from the sea? What I mainly recall is the masterful filming in close quarters (a yacht so cramped, any kind of filming would seem impossible), the parallax effect illustrated by jump cuts, and the incongruity of Polanski’s voice issuing from another actor’s mouth. (He really wanted to play that role, even stripping naked in the production office when Jerzy Skolimowski told him he wasn’t handsome enough.)

REPULSION — easy. Begins and ends with closeup of Catherine Deneuve’s eye.

CUL DE SAC — almost a one-location film, but certain elements offering a looping effect, such as the “regular plane” that flies overhead at intervals. It does so during the mammoth long take on the beach, and Lionel Stander mistakes it for a rescue mission. It returns in the closing shot, mocking the possibility of rescue for anybody.

(Strong memories of a childhood holiday at Lindisfarne, Polanski’s location — driving back as the tides came over the causeway, a feeling of elation not shared by my parents who were convinced we were all going to die…)

THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS — begins and ends with the vampire killers on a snowy path, in a sleigh. Stentorious voiceover man, painted sky, moonlight.

ROSEMARY’S BABY — super-faithful version of the book, doesn’t do a loop back on itself, except for the lullaby music theme by Komeda, which has acquired new meaning by the film’s conclusion.

MACBETH — loops back, not to the opening scene, but to earlier in the plot, amounting to the same thing. In a scene not present in Shakespear, and indeed I’m sure quite far from Shakespeare’s mind, we see one of the lesser combatants of the film’s climax on the road to the witches’ lair — another Scotsman due to be corrupted. Shakespeare’s tragedies tend to end with the order of the universe restored, after a period when everything’s out of balance. Polanski’s universe exists in perpetual turmoil and darkness, and so his conclusion is to show more of the same massing on the horizon…

WHAT? — the least-seen of the early films, and most despised, this slightly macabre sex comedy begins and ends on the road, with Sydne Rome’s arrival at and departure from the villa of peculiar persons, but there’s much more to it than that. Polanski himself has described the film as a rondo, and repetition plays an important part, as when the same petal falls from the same flower on the same note of the same piano piece, two mornings in a row… deja vu, or some kind of time-loop? Has Polanski been reading The Invention of Morel? Or is this just the structure of the rondo in action?

CHINATOWN has much of foreshadowing and clues and premonitions, as Alex and I discussed. It isn’t circular, but it does end up in the titular region, a place which has been discussed off and on throughout the movie. Screenwriter Robert Towne (“As much as he certainly is an annoying little prick, Polanski is also undoubtedly the best collaborator I’ve ever had.”) intended “Chinatown” just as a kind of state of being, the place where you try to keep someone from being hurt, and you end up making sure they are hurt. The world, in other words. Polanski felt, in fairness to the audience’s perhaps simpler expectations, you couldn’t have a film called CHINATOWN without a scene set IN Chinatown. So the ending literalises the metaphor.

THE TENANT — another easy one. Time and identity perform a neat swivel, causing Polansky’s character (“He’s just oversensitive,” says the director) to wind up back in time, in a woman’s body, witnessing himself making the fatal decision that will (somehow) land him in this hospital deathbed, a multiply fractured Soldier in White.

Dialogue from DEREK AND CLIVE GET THE HORN ~

Dudley Moore: “When we go up to heaven, they’re going to play this film to us. On a loop. As we burn.”

Peter Cook: “You don’t burn in heaven.”

Dud: “We will.”

TESS — can’t recall… the character is set towards her fate in the very first scene, I remember that much. A conspiracy of fate brings about the downfall of a character who has “intelligence, beauty, and a spirited approach to life,” — the film is dedicated to Sharon Tate not just because it was her favourite book (how many starlets read Hardy?) and she gave it to her husband to read, but because it shows the same malign universal forces working that led to that night when the wrong people died, when nobody should have died at all.

PIRATES — behaves like one of the shorts, the two main characters winding up exactly where they started, adrift on a raft in shark-infested waters. That slightly over-determined ending, with its hint that a sequel might be forthcoming (not a chance, after the movie sank at the box office), is perhaps what scuppers the movie’s ending, which seems to deliberately avoid settling any of the plot points. The hero is pulled away from battle, the virgin winds up in the arms of the most evil man alive, the villain triumphs — if we have to wait for the sequel to sort it out, it’s a lousy ending. Considered as a remake of CHINATOWN, it kind of works, especially as a shocking, offensive way to treat an audience who’ve come to see a comic swashbuckler.

FRANTIC — think it begins and ends with Harrison Ford in a taxi, from airport to Paris and back again. It’s the story of a rather unconventional second honeymoon, or as Polanski said, an attempt to demonstrate that “Anxiety has no upper limit.”

BITTER MOON — whole movie framed on a boat, so it naturally returns to its starting point… another botched and bitter second honeymoon.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN — doesn’t this begin and end with a string quartet playing the title piece (also heard in WHAT?)? This seemed like one of RP’s weaker films (I blame the play), but I might revisit it to see what happens.

THE NINTH GATE — begins as another of those New York Satanism films, winds up with Johnny Depp becoming an illustration in the book he’s been chasing, so there’s a kind of circularity there, albeit a strange one.

THE PIANIST — need to see this one again, for sure. What I mainly recall is another weird time thing — in all his films, when there’s a tenement building or stairwell, Polanski uses a distant piano playing or practicing. In this movie, the piano overheard from next door becomes a major plot point.

OLIVER TWIST — when Polanski does Victorian literature, he’s less able to make the plot turn into a loop. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.

What does all this prove? Well, although Polanski denies being a pessimist, he is one — not because of the dark and dreadful things in his films, but because his films don’t, usually, hold out the possibility of change. Or not positive change, anyhow. Polanski once said that if he had the chance to live his life again, he wouldn’t. Which is, on the surface, quite a pessimistic remark, but even more so when one considers that, for most of us, the offer to live our life again would include the option of making changes, of doing things differently. Polanski doesn’t see that as part of the deal. Around and around we go…

UK links —

Roman Polanski Collection [DVD] [1968]

The Ghost [DVD] [2010]

Chinatown (Special Collector’s Edition) [1974] [DVD]

US links —

The Ghost Writer

Repulsion- (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Oliver Twist (2005)

A Floury Scarf

At the end of Dreyer’s VAMPYR (spoiler alert) the evil doctor (a fore-clone of Professor Abronsius from Polanski’s THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS) is famously smothered under an onslaught of flour. We can look back to Griffith’s A CORNER IN WHEAT and forward to Peter Weir’s WITNESS, but seems to have been thought up independently, after a visit to a plaster factory got Dreyer thinking about WHITE.

Personally, what I like is the way he takes his scarf off as he’s being smothered. Like that’s going to make him more comfortable. “Blimey, it’s — kaff! kaff! — warm in here,” he could almost be saying. This is the kind of weirdness that makes VAMPYR so memorable, and it suffuses everything from the design (this is perhaps THE great wallpaper movie) through the photography (the sharp interiors and deliberately light-fogged exteriors) to the camera moves (which follow the actors about but don’t respond to their every hesitation: the camera keeps drifting as the actor pauses, then catches up). This is the kind of stuff that gives the film its particular oneiric sway.

Incidentally, my friend Robert tells me he just dreamt he was co-starring in a remake of Chan-Wook Park’s LADY VENGEANCE alongside the artist formerly known as Prince. I resolve to dream a movie tonight so I can compete with that epic at the box office of the subconscious. I’ll let you know if I succeed.

The marvellous Eureka Masters of Cinema DVD of VAMPYR comes stuffed with extras, including a commentary by Guillermo del Toro which begins “Just imagine a fat Mexican has come to your house and you have to listen to him talk,” and Craig Keller’s sweet documentary about Dreyer’s leading man, Baron Nicholas de Gunzberg, who helped finance the film as well as appearing in it (he’s a very effective, unusual actor, and his money obviously didn’t stink either). Baron Nick’s later status in American fashion, as mentor to Calvin Klein, was news to me, and a delight.

Between love and madness lies obsession.

One More Waltz

The opening scene of Duvivier’s LA BANDERA, in which crime passionelletype Jean Gabin flees Paris and joins the foreign legion. It’s not my fave Duviv, by any means, but that’s a fine, moody opening.

First, the slinky move across the rooftops, which looks like multiplane animation a la PINOCCHIO, with a weird transition once it comes to a halt, shifting us into live action. Polanski fans could compare it with the move from animated credits to live action at the start of THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS.

It illustrates a key point about Duvivier’s generation, who wanted to address social issues and were generally a bit more excited by the underclass than the upper crust (though Duvivier, no left-winger, made films about both). The whole poetic realist school is deeply interested in seedy environments that breed or harbour crime, but they’re paradoxically studio-bound. These guys didn’t want any faux-documetary rough edges, and most of them were probably horrified by that jazzy nouvelle vague roughness when it came along. Marcel Carné started off wanting to bring the camera onto the streets, but soon found satisfaction in recreating the streets — exactly — in the studio.

The boxy interior sound of the couple’s steps testify to the fact that none of this is quite authentic, but the mix of genre thrills — we’re way ahead of film noir here, which has yet to be invented and named, but that’s what this is nonetheless — and social realism is exciting as hell to me.

I love the faux-split-screen composition that allows us a glimpse into a window and onto the street at the same time, and then — well, let’s allow Dudley Andrew to take up the tale, with the two-fisted yet plangent prose that characterises his excellent book Mists of Regret, containing the best writing on Duvivier I’ve managed to find ~

“It’s opening sequence could stand as a prologue for poetic realism as a whole: a dark street seen from above; through a second-story window of a cheap hotel, the silhouette of a figure disappears; at ground level now, a tipsy couple careens towards us from the far plane as the camera moves laterally to frame the glistening street, with the hotel standing on one border; the tipsy woman, white-clad, rests against a lamppost in a closer shot that lets us glimpse a man limned in shadow (Jean Gabin); from her perspective we see the man dart out of the doorway; she grabs him in jest, and he pushes her away in hurrying past; when her boyfriend steps over to help, the lamplight reveals bloodstains where her dress was touched by Gabin; the camera slowly tilts to reveal the street sign: Rue Saint-Victor.”

That tilt at the end of the night scene is a particularly strong piece of DIRECTION, in the literal sense of directing the audience’s gaze towards something. It’s such an authored move, it sticks out, particularly to a modern sensibility — one rarely gets such a bold intervention in film narration these days. So Duvivier isn’t at all afraid to show his hand, though having the kind of craftsmanlike attitude he had, he’d probably deny ever moving the camera in such a blatant way. The move is particularly strong since we don’t know why we’re moving, and even when we arrive at the street sign, its significance isn’t really clear until we dissolve to the next scene.

And then there’s the almost-too-archetypal shot of Gabin through the Venetian blinds — back when that kind of image was basically NEW. Yup, I think if this movie came on TV, based on that opening scene, a lot of us would want to see the rest…

LA BANDERA is available second-hand, but it ain’t exactly cheap…