I feel like a pig shat in my head. And not because I had too much fun drinking last night. Nope, not a thing to drink – just the normal blinding, incapacitating headaches that come with a life of fear and paranoia in the big city. Still, my apartment is a relatively safe haven, what with its bountiful reserves of candy and bed. Such peaceful abodes seem to have eluded M. Polanski who should have taken the presence of Shelley Winters as concierge as a bad sign from the get-go.
I’ve said before that I was never a big fan of Polanski, mostly on the basis of rolling my eyes at the past 15 years of his filmmaking, but I had recently watched Knife in the Water and dug it, especially the claustrophic feel, despite being shot almost entirely in wide open spaces (but trapped on a boat). Trapped here in an apartment; not the confusing every-shot-through-the-doorway apartment of Roseamry’s Baby, but the Euro-version: Small, old, filthy and tiny.
I can’t particularly fathom why Polanski’s character spirals as far out of control as he does – or as suddenly – the wig-wearing and make-up applying did go on for quite some time and came from out of nowhere. But who am I to argue with crazy?
I’m somewhat interested to know if the things that seemed random are really random – or allusions to something I’m just entirely missing?
For example, the pan across the graffitti in the ‘loo gets progressively more orderly and Egyptian. We know also that the guy who was in love with the dead tenant before Polanski was thinking of her while in the Egyptian rooms (“apartment” was the word he said actally – or maybe department?) at the Louvre, and he sends her/him an Egyptian postcard from there. The connection is what? That his toilet is a secret portal to the Egptian wing of the Louvre?
The tooth in the wall wrapped in gauze?
Then there’s the Wicker Man-esque ritual in the courtyard where they dress up the girl with a red cape and mask. And that means… ? Are they trying to trick Donald Sutherland too?
None of this distracts from the film’s many joys, Isabella Adjani high among them. If ever there was a woman who should exist in a seperate universe from the one that contains Shelley Winters it would be her.
I’ve seen a couple films recently now that make me think David Lynch isn’t nearly as original as I’d thought him to be. The creepy imagined attack by the old landlord couple on Polanski seemed lifted wholesale from Mulholland Drive. The old “Two souls inhabiting the same body” trick is well-worn Lynch territory as well.
And while the ending itself hardly felt like the kind of Twilight Zone kicker that maybe it was in ’76, I wasn’t entirely prepared for Polanski throwing himself out of a window, only to break his leg, bleeding, and manage to crawl back up all the flights of stairs to his apartment only to do it again while the neighbors look on, with an “oh no… please don’t throw yourself out of the window again” attitude. Excellent creepy stuff.
Also recently watched / re-watched:
-Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness and Fata Morgana
-The Life Aquatic (with a small scene containing backgammon in it.)
