In Which The Moon Is Not Only Beautiful

This week we look back at the films of Roman Polanski.

Sublime Torture

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Bitter Moon
128 minutes
dir. Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski's love affair with camp was no surprise to European audiences who had experienced the wacky fun of disembodied hands brushing against Catherine Deneuve's carapace in 1965's Repulsion. Horror for Polanski was only a pretext to a greater amusement. At the age of 21, Denueve was practically carved out of stone and Polanski's defilement of her had to be addictive, to the point where married the next woman he cast in a similar role.

When he meets Emmanuelle Seigner in 1992's Bitter Moon, Hugh Grant is taking a cruise to Istanbul so he and his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) can from there explore India. After seven years of marriage, things have coalesced to a standstill. On the journey he meets fellow passenger Peter Coyote, cast as a paraplegic with a beautiful wife. Coyote remains a bit too vital for the role, but with fake yellow teeth and an enigmatic plea to Hugh, he begins to regale us with the story of how he comes to be an invalid with Emmanuelle Seigner as his caregiver/companion.

The time was Paris, fifteen years earlier. The romance is achingly familiar. On their first date, he watches Emmanuelle play hopscotch in the street. Maudlin music rumbles on in the background, heightening the tragedy which is to follow. For the moment, things are in the nascent stage. He rubs her feet when she says they are cold, she keeps something he gave her in a little green notebook. During the evenings, she listens to him read poetry, crouching on the floor, peering up at his armchair like a favored pet.

Polanski pairs Emmanuelle's seductive milk dance and George Michael's "Faith" for fun. Covered by only a bathrobe, she smothers the substance all over her body to the songs' opening notes and Peter Coyote attacks the outpouring. It is both hysterically unerotic and perfectly in sync with Polanski's own sensibility: A man's orgasm, synchronized to the ejaculation of bread from the toaster. She observes him shaving with a straight razor, his first mistake. He intones, "Her pussy was a neat, discrete little cleft." It takes a serious while for their sexual proclivities to become grating.

Critics amazingly did not understand this was a comedy. New Republic critic Stanley Kauffman called Bitter Moon "swill," which strengthens the theory he has been dead since 1988, and Martin Peretz has been ghostwriting his material ever since. (Kauffmann also called Swift's A Modest Proposal "outrageous!") Even such complaints themselves are addressed in Bitter Moon: Peter is a frustrated writer whose editor (Stockard Channing) begs him to come back to New York because he has lost touch. For good reason, he refuses.

The telling of the story is as exhausting as it must have been to live it. "Have you ever truly idolized a woman?" he berates Hugh Grant as he passes along the story of their romance. (Under the spell of the tale, monogamy instantly becomes as abhorrent to Grant as Jews were for Agatha Christie.) Polanski has always reveled in making Seigner as feminine and then suddenly as masculine as possible, stretching her austere and extraordinary beauty like another skin. In some ways, she could not be more exposed than she is in Bitter Moon where every body part takes on a luscious, explosive tinge. Peter's response is to tell her, "It's a pity you're not in publishing." His penis is shaped like a question mark.

"I've always found infidelity the most titillating aspect of every relationship," he tells Hugh. When Grant first began cheating on Elizabeth Hurley, a great outpouring of sentiment began on her behalf. How could anyone cheat on such a beauty! was the requisite outcry. This of course was the only possible more sexist position than the one Grant himself inhabited. "I came to resent her failure to excite me the way she used to," opines Peter's hilarious narration. Later, he gives Emmanuelle a concussion by slapping her face when she criticizes his writing.

Peter soon finds that he loathes the sight of her. Soon enough, he is free, focused on indulging himself: "Every time I looked in one woman's eyes I saw the reflection of the next." She returns only to torture him and take her revenge for his behavior. Yvor Winters' poem "The Bitter Moon" is apropos, always apropos:

The Bitter Moon

Dry snow runs burning
on the ground like fire —
the quick of Hell spin on
the wind. Should I believe
in this your body, take it
at its word? I have believed
in nothing. Earth burns with a
shadow that has held my
flesh; the eye is a shadow
that consumes the mind
Scream into air! The voices
Of the dead still vibrate —
they will find them, threading
all the past with twinging
wires alive like hair in cold.
These are the nerves
of death. I am its brain.

You are the way, the oath
I take. I hold to this —
I bent and thwarted by a will
to live among the living dead
instead of the dead living; I
become a voice to sound for.
Can you feel through Space,
imagine beyond Time?

                             The
snow alive with moonlight
licks about my ankles.
Can you find this end?

Winters always took things a line too far, not unlike Roman Polanski.

The basic outline of Bitter Moon is not of Roman's own making, and so he invests every frame with his own ideas and feelings about what is going on. He is powerless not to impose himself on Pascal Bruckner's story, not to make the summation of every scene his own outsized finding. This setup shows off his power better than when he pursues his own material.

In Bitter Moon, Polanski's composition is an incredible mishmash of biting satire and broad comedy. At times, his control is almost overwhelming: the blue and yellow jacket Mimi first appears in makes another appearance when Peter tries to dump her on a bench one Paris evening. Women resemble or do not resemble each other depending on the flavor of their environment, the underlying meaning of the transformation. Cinematographer Tonino Colli's longtime collaboration with Pasolini's similar strategy unifies the film's structure. Each contained frame is prearranged, quietly and masterfully extending the satire.

"What did I do?" she asks him. "Even a criminal is told his crime." "You didn't do anything," he informs her. "You exist."

Bitter Moon is a film outside its own time. In 1992, it was impossible to imagine that someone could even get bored of sex with Emmanuelle Seigner. But now we can fathom every starlet completely. Two weeks ago I saw Kate Winslet in an airport and I almost offered her a tissue as consolation. We don't have ingenues anymore, we possess known qualities. In some ways, this makes people more exciting, that possibility of knowing them in their entirety. But in other ways, it is nothing more than a cold fright.

After hearing out Peter's story in the present of the cruise ship, Hugh Grant cannot possibly approach Emmanuelle in the same way. Instead of woman, she better resembles a crushed grape. Yet in the usual fashion in which pity is constantly confused with sexual attraction, he makes out with her hard and asks where they can be alone together.

Hugh's wife tries to play the same game with another passenger, but it disagrees with her constitution and she throws it up in the toilet of their cabin. Polanski turns the whole thing into a cosmic joke simply by using pop music, with the climactic scene pumping out Bryan Ferry's "Slave to Love" while Kristin and Emmanuelle make out at a New Year's party. By the end almost everyone has done something they're ashamed of.

The Museum of Modern Art screens Bitter Moon at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, 9/28.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Cameron Crowe's Singles. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Is It Done" - J. Mascis (mp3)

"I Can't Help Falling In Love With You" - Elvis Presley (mp3)

"Bird on the Wire" - Leonard Cohen (mp3)