In Which These Are Sisters In Disguise

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

The Double Life

by KARINA WOLF

Repulsion
dir. Roman Polanski
105 minutes

Catherine Deneuve followed her sister Françoise Dorléac into filmmaking. Acting was the family business – their father had been a voiceover artist, their mother a doyenne at the Odeon Theatre, and their grandmother an off-stage prompter in Paris. Françoise started in a traditional way, studying at the Conservatoire for a career on the stage.

Catherine was less certain — her first job was for pocket money, playing her sister's twin in Les Collegiennes. They were both beautiful: at times you can see the resemblance, like a double exposed negative of the same person. She took her mother's maiden name, Deneuve, to separate herself professionally. Personally, they were distinct in several ways: Françoise was outgoing, impetuous, impatient. Catherine was inward, shy, hesitant.

Like many actors who began as children, Catherine was employed for the implications of her form. In even her youngest, most tentative roles, she imparts an unusual melancholy – she is an ingénue only in her Jacques Demy film, the candy-colored The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. From Demy she learned the importance of mise-en-scene, the choreography of a film's aesthetic elements. Perhaps because she was an untrained child actress, she was willing to be led. In part, it is this strange ability and self-knowledge, this volition to be used, that makes Deneuve the perfect heroine for so many directors.

Polanski uses her sadness and inexperience to great effect in Repulsion. The psychological horror film was the director's first in English. All his movies have a hermetic quality – inspired by but unrelated to the living world. This one, about a French girl in London whose mind is eclipsed by madness, was triply removed from reality:

DENEUVE: Three of us were French: Roman, who, despite being Polish, spoke French all the time, Gérard Brach, and me. We really were the Three Musketeers. Everybody else on set was British. Roman knew exactly how to be respected by the crew, he was no pushover. But because we spoke French, we experienced the making of that film a little from the sidelines, in a rather unique atmosphere. We were a core within the team.

In TV footage from his set, Polanski demonstrates for his star the body language and timing of her character’s reactions quite specifically. He counts out the rhythms of the camera movements; he mimes the intensely fragile delivery of the central character. Deneuve says she is quite pleased with the director: he began his career as a performer, so he understands how to talk to an actor.

Deneuve described the shooting of the fraught film as paradoxically happy. She had a British husband, David Bailey (the inspiration for the lothario photographer in Antonioni’s Blow Up), tony friends (Mick Jagger was the best man at her London wedding) and a sympathetic director who spoke her language (unlike her husband).

There are probably as many ways to direct a movie as there are auteurs. But part of the impulse to produce an effect: I’ve sat with more than one director who has monitored the minute physical reactions of an audience during a screening. The profession is part puppetry and part self-revelation, wherein the director can mold a universe in which the characters and story create a pleasing reality (though pleasing for a director might mean emotional provocation for everyone else).

By having a barely-fluent lead, Polanski's film reinforces the odd idea that sound and dialogue don’t mean much in film. At other times, his sets and cultural referents are those of a person who may have read about a place but never visited it. It’s as if all experience of the outer world is filtered in third-hand. This is fine, of course. Polanski isn’t exactly interested in recreating a documentary world. One can be tempted to say that perhaps it's a documentary of Polanski’s rather unusual psyche.

Repulsion is an experimental film, the kind a college student might attempt, with its fish-eyed closeups of the heroine, who moves from extreme sensitivity to murder and madness. At times, the film is little more than an excuse to look — at length — at one of the world’s most beautiful women. And to watch her suffer, and then take sudden, poisonous revenge on the world that threatens her.

His films as recently as The Ghost Writer and The Pianist make it seem that Polanski’s priorities are unchanged. I was impressed with The Pianist's long passages of silence, when the hero wanders an empty expanse of bombed out Warsaw; his isolation is heightened by the temporary hearing impairment from an explosion. Many of Polanski's characters are cushioned by a similar deprivation. Silence can be restful and protective, or pernicious and toxic.

In 1966's Cul-de-sac, human nature is equivalent to a scorpion’s. Françoise Dorléac's Teresa is unfaithful, slightly spoiled, beautiful and reactive, very much the opposite of Deneuve’s Carol in Repulsion. She’s a real woman who exists in the world — confined in a marriage to an ineffectual but very wealthy member of the British upper class.

The film begins with a couple of criminals whose car stalls on a beach in low tide. One of the pair is gravely wounded. The other, a slab of a man with a boxer’s brow, stumbles off in search of help — he finds Françoise, topless on the beach and embracing a young man. The bully wanders onto the estate — and there we discover Françoise is actually married, and to a different man from the one she was kissing. The husband is George, a bald would-be gentleman who has bought an island castle, it seems, to show off to his friends.

Polanski is terrific at using the camera for a slow, controlled revelation. There's an odd visual pantomime of the exchange of gender roles. Teresa dresses George in her dressing gown, then paints makeup on his face. It’s completely plausible behavior, but as Polanski films it, it’s troubling. What is the relationship between these two? The decoration of George is intimate and playful but irreverent and emasculating. In effect, she dominates him. When the criminal breaks into the house at night to use their telephone, George responds to the intruder while still in female dress. It is utterly impossible for him to regain his footing as the lord of the manor, and the couple are quickly held hostage by the brute who awaits the arrival of Mr. Kastelbach, a Beckettian crime lord whose arrival will signal their delivery to safety. Naturally, Mr. Kastelbach never shows. The criminals don’t survive the siege — but that is unsurprising. The couple is unspared as well, mostly by their own violence.

Polanski assigns intensely angry impulses to his protagonists. When impotent, they have diversely self-harming behaviors. Françoise's character becomes provocative, setting fires between the toes of their sleeping attacker and leveling an empty shotgun at herself while she checks to see the gauges are empty. 

Cul-de-sac has a broader arc of action, a more diverse playing field of characters. So why does Repulsion linger in the public imagination?

ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: What I see is the mark of an auteur. Beyond the excellence of your acting, what all your films seem to share, is your gaze, your point of view.

DENEUVE: Yes, you’re right, that’s what it is: a gaze. I think I’ve always leaned toward that. Perhaps because I never went to acting school and never worked with actors. I only ever met them on film sets — I never really had any actor friends, apart from my sister. I was always on the director’s side, or the screenwriter’s. I didn’t choose to, it just happened.”

AD: Like the film you made with Demy, Repulsion demands a closeness between the director and the actor.

CD: Yes, I felt very, very close to Roman. That’s the film I feel I helped make. The producers were used to producing porn. It was a small budget film and for them, nothing of great consequence.

You could argue that Françoise was the better-looking sister, with more symmetrical features and a lither figure. Catherine had prominent eyes, deeply shadowed eyes. Her jaw and nose are less graceful. But why is she the greater star?

In Four Beats To The Bar And No Cheating, Bailey contrasts his first wife and muse Deneuve with his second, supermodel Jean Shrimpton, who he calls a "democratic beauty." Shrimpton was unintimidating and appealing to many. Of course, one could say "undemocratic beauty" is really what we know as "cute."

There's a notable immobility in her expressions — she is an actress who learned her craft while she was doing it, from other actors, and perhaps more importantly, from the directors who saw her as the perfect conspirator. When she's interviewed as a young woman, her inexperience is evident. She purses her lips and flirts with the camera with the assuredness of the beautiful (the smiles, flicking her tongue along her upper lip when she talks). What's wonderful about her as an actress is that she loses all those ticks onscreen.

She is her own center of gravity — and for the first chapter of her career, seemed to work better in films that were overly stylized. Her initial skills as an actress were the guilelessness and remove that accompanied her odd, slightly disturbing beauty. She lets herself go: "Sometimes you have to accept that the image is more powerful than you…" 

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about the rabbit hole. Her book The Insomniacs is forthcoming from Penguin Putnam.

"Paris Paris" - Malcolm McLaren & Catherine Denueve (mp3)

"Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus" - Malcolm McLaren (mp3)

"Revenge of the Flowers" - Malcolm McLaren & Francoise Hardy (mp3)

"La Main Parisienne" - Malcolm McLaren (mp3)

He's Only One Man: Roman Polanski

Daniel D'Addario on Frantic

Kara VanderBijl on Tess

Alex Carnevale on Bitter Moon

Karina Wolf on Repulsion & Cul-de-sac

Durga Chew-Bose on Rosemary's Baby

Polanski's Script

In Which We Explore Roman Polanski's Soft Spot

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

Script

by ROMAN POLANSKI

Back in the days when I was at film school — I think it's different today — we made two silent films of two or three minutes each during the first year. In the third year we made a documentary, and in the fourth a fiction film. Through year film we made our diploma project, the length of which was between 300 and 600 metres. Aside from those requirements, we also worked on other films, for example my own short Two Men and a Wardrobe.

Before I made Two Men and a Wardrobe I'd already made The Bike but it was never finished because the lab accidentally sent a reel of the negative to Moscow where the Youth Festival was taking place, and it was never seen again. The film was in color, and I think it would have been quite good. I did make another film in color, When Angels Fall, which was my diploma film.

Although it was never my intention, Two Men and a Wardrobe is rather symbolic. Two men come out of the sea carrying a wardrobe and walk into town. People can't stand the sight of them traipsing around with this thing, especially when they go into cafes or try to get onto a tram. They stick out and because of this provoke hatred wherever they go. I wanted to show the unpleasant things going on in town around the two of them, all these crimes that no one does anything about because everyone's focused on these two strangers. No one says anything to the murderer of the boys who kill the cat, but at the same time they can't tolerate this bizarre trio of two and the wardrobe who end up just walking back into the ocean.

Of course, that's my version. Every audience member will presumably come up with something completely different. But it's a film, not an article in a political journal or newspaper imbued with an ideology or philosophy.

The Fat and the Lean is the story of a man enslaved. The idea is simply that of someone being tormenting and made to endure harsher and harsher suffering, and who is eventually happy to return to his original hardships. It's similar to the story of the man who bangs his head against the wall. When asked why, he explains, "Because it feels so good when I stop."

I don't have any preferences for shooting on location - it depends on the story. I'm inspired by what I find on film sets. With The Fat and the Lean, for example, it was important that the man escaped into a flat landscape because then we can see that the place he's running away from — the town, this oasis — is so far away. The story couldn't take place in a house where all he would have to do is open and close the door.

I need a situation or characters in order to write a screenplay. The most important thing, whether it's cinema or theater, where someone is playing a part (abstract films don't count), is character. The character, even if it's a dog, is always at the center of the story. Dramatic situations are quickly forgotten but characters remain. A good film is always about its characters, whether we're watching Charles Chaplin, James Dean or James Stewart. For a novel, the writer finds an interesting character he wants to describe and only then creates the story around this person.

with Robert Evans

Apparently some authors — and this applies to painters, too — don't know what they're going to do before they start. They just do it. The results can be astounding, but that's not my way of working. For my short films I always outlined the editing very accurately by making storyboards of each shot, though this never stopped me from changing things at the last minute.

Why not make use of whatever arises on location? I didn't plan each shot with as much care for Knife in the Water because it would have been too time-consuming and I couldn't be bothered. Also because it's just not possible to have control over absolutely everything. The story takes place on a tiny yacht and the situations between the characters are limited. I had to approach it much more in terms of improvisation, and it helped to make only basic sketches of the shots.

Not using direct sound in my short films was never a financial consideration. There are some films where music works better than everyday noises. To include every single sound means a film becomes realistic and concrete, leaving nothing to the imagination. It's not a good idea to include both music and sound effects — you have to choose between them. My short films are not at all realistic so I wanted music in them. I asked a musician whom I've known for a long time to compose something that would express the feelings behind the images. If I'd got rid of the music, I would have added only sound effects and the audience would have wondered why the characters never spoke out loud. But if I'd written dialogue, the story would have become uninteresting. When something is expressed too clearly, it can fall flat.

Cinema isn't like chemistry where you can predict that ten grams of one substance, when combined with five grams of another, will give a particular result. With cinema, I do as I please. When I started at film school everyone had their own theories, but today this is precisely what I mistrust more than anything else. You can't make films with theories, except for things like Last Year in Marienbad which is far too serious for me.

Everything in this life has a comic quality on the surface and a tragic quality underneath. Comic episodes often hide supposedly serious incidents. It's the kind of thing that happens at a funeral or even in a concentration camp. I think that in spite of their great suffering, the prisoners laughed from time to time because of these moments of comedy. There's a lot of literature in this vein.

Personally, I can't stand overly serious films Kaneto Shindo's 1961 film The Naked Island. Besides, they aren't very good films. Life like this just doesn't exist, just as you'd never encounter the kinds of situations you see in Last Year at Marienbad.

I worked as an actor — not as an assistant — for Andrzej Wajda, and I think I've been influenced by him. I worked with Andrzej Munk because we were friends and he asked me, but we had different ideas about cinema. Though I'm more like Wajda and I like his work very much, you can hardly say that I imitate him. My films are quite different from his, though his Ashes and Diamonds is my favorite film. Among Polish talents who are unknown here in France is Wojciech Has who made a film called The Art of Loving.

I'm fairly dismissive of the French nouvelle vague directors because they've made so many third rate films that I can't stand. But what's wonderful is that as a movement, it's completely changed French — and maybe even global — film production. I feel that films like Breathless and all the Francois Truffaut films are works of art.

I'm also very fond of American cinema, directors like Orson Welles and Elia Kazan, and films like Baby Doll, A Face in the Crowd, and Viva Zapata!. I wouldn't say I have a favorite director — I like some of a director's films and not others. I also have a soft spot for American silent comedies which I don't think you could call burlesque.

Repulsion

To my mind, Chaplin's films are very realistic. Look at the walk-on actors — they're so natural. I also like Buster Keaton and The World of Harold Lloyd which has instances of pure genius, like when he climbs like an alpinist over a man who's trying to extract his own tooth. Those are things that you dream and read about as a child. A real man climbing over a man twice his height — it's hilarious! You know, I don't laugh very often at the cinema. If I see something I like, I usually just laugh silently. But that Harold Lloyd film had me rolling in fits of laughter.

I have access to everything I need when I'm filming in Poland. Censorship really isn't an issue there. It's only relevant once a film is finished, but is rarely enforced. In order to make a film, a script has to be shown to a commission whose members meet once or twice a week. Each member receives the script two or three weeks before the meeting where they decide if the film can be made. There are eight production groups in Poland and I'm a member of the Kamera Group. When I have an idea, I submit it to my group leader. If he likes it, he'll ask me to develop it into a script that can be presented to the commission. If the commission rejects it, I'm not able to make the film. The commission deals only with feature films — for shorts it's different because they're less expensive and fewer people are involved. My teacher was responsible for my work and gave his approval for the two or three films I made at the Lodz Film Academy. For Mammals I worked with an independent production group that made shorts and that was able to make certain decision without consulting the authorities.

In Poland I've been accused of "individualistic pessimism." Maybe this has something to do with my personality because I'm a mischievous person. But I can't say that every single critic is against me because most of them have helped a lot. Though critics are important in Poland, it's not like here in France where they can influence audiences and seriously affect a film's reception. At home the authorities support the critics, and a film director — or the group to which he belongs — would encounter serious problems, if for example, his film was labeled as reactionary by one or more official newspapers which are the mouthpieces of the party. But it never happens.

May 1963

with Francesca Annis

From a radio interview with Philip Short:

POLANSKI: When I wrote at the start of my autobiography, "For as far back as I can remember, the line between fantasy and reality has been hopelessly blurred," what I meant was I simply didn't have any concept of where the limits of what's possible are. This helped me in my childhood, my youth and even lately to achieve certain aims and goals that I wouldn't be able to reach without the conviction that everything is possible.

Q: There are people who would say that you brought your troubles on yourself.

POLANSKI: Well, I think that's total nonsense. Of course, to a certain extent you are responsible for your style of life, the life you are leading. You have a choice of the amplitude of the events that happen - the higher you get, the harder you fall. I understand there's a gentleman in England who decided to spend the rest of his life in bed. Not because he's ill, it was just his decision. Such people have very little risk of being run over by a car. So if you see it likes this, then yes, I am responsible, because maybe I live a fuller life than other people.

Q: You came to the West, you went to Hollywood, you married and your wife was murdered. How did you cope when that happened? Quite suddenly, out of the blue, everything that you valued was taken away.

POLANSKI: One doesn't know how one copes with things like that. At the moment one just has to make a decision: to go on living or end it all. I know that in writing this book I had great difficulty in recalling those moments. I had no difficulty at all in remembering all kinds of details from my childhood, but wherever I really suffered grief — in particular, this tragedy — I understand now that my mind just tends to reject certain things, to forget them completely. That probably helps me to live with it afterwards.

1984

"Silver Time Machine" - Death in Vegas (mp3)

"Medication" - Death in Vegas (mp3)

"Your Loft My Acid" - Death in Vegas (mp3)

"Black Hole" - Death in Vegas (mp3)

with Walter Matthau on the set of "Pirates"

In Which Roman Polanski Gives Tess A Certain Romantic Weight

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

A Woman Revealed

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Tess
dir. Roman Polanski
186 minutes

Polanski filmed Tess in France, a fugitive. Wanted in the United States for sexual assault and fearing extradition if he remained in England, he fled to a rural slice of territory in Brittany. Where else could such a man have found refuge? What other story could he have brought to life? Shortly before her murder by the Manson family in 1969, Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate had sent him a copy of it along with a note: “This would make a great film.” She had no idea.

Tess Durbeyfield (Nastassja Kinski), the daughter of uneducated farmers, must go claim kinship with a wealthy distant cousin when a parson idly tells her father that he is not, in fact, simply John Durbeyfield but rather the last of a defunct noble family, the d’Urbervilles. The Durbeyfield’s horse has died and they face certain desperation, so Tess reluctantly accepts a position at the d’Urberville manor as a poultry maid, although it becomes clear soon enough that “cousins” Lady d’Urberville and her son Alec (Leigh Lawson) are not true relations, having bought the title. Alec’s immediate infatuation with her both fascinates and repulses her, but when he rapes her one foggy evening in the forest she can dream of nothing but escaping him. Pregnant and by all societal standards shamed, she returns home where she gives birth to a sickly infant that does not survive.

French posters for the film promised enticingly, “The film that revealed Nastassja Kinski!” While entire sequences revolve around her mouth — its innocent fullness, the way the lips tremble at the slightest emotion — the promise is almost entirely ironic. The sixteen-year-old German had already gained notoriety by appearing nude in a previous film (Sykes’ To The Devil…A Daughter, released in 1976), and in Tess barely reveals more than a demure breast to feed a squalling child.

Yet the memory alone of such startling young womanhood — an eager body — lends to the story a heroine that has not reappeared in any subsequent adaptations of Hardy’s novel. She is a woman of cunning naivete who is still no more than a girl, a woman one wants to blame for one’s sin, a “pure woman faithfully presented.” One can detect Kinski subtly blooming in this role, which would award her with worldwide recognition.

Similarly, one can sense Polanski’s fumbling attempts to discover his ingénue, a manic search that might have led to the sudden intimacy between himself and Kinski, despite the fact that he was almost three times her age and convicted of a similar offense across the puddle.

What is it in a man that longs to discover a woman? When Tess leaves home once again, some time later, she begins working for a kindly dairy farmer — and it is in these idyllic pastures that she meets Angel Clare (Peter Firth), an aspiring young farmer attracted to what he considers to be her singular purity and her natural, unspoiled femininity. Since Tess believes herself to be forever tainted, she struggles against her growing affection. Determined to begin anew she attempts to tell Angel what happened between her and Alec by shoving a note under his door, an almost passive-aggressive gesture begging for trouble.

The most spectacular moment in the film captures Tess as she finds the note, unread, untouched, on their wedding day; the brilliant sun obscures her from our vision as she descends the barn ladder, her face one moment the picture of ecstasy and the next, unbearable pain. Her next chance comes at supper, and she tells Angel, trembling, of the night she was victimized. The fire burns low as she stares into it. Blurred in the background, you can almost feel the cold radiating off of Angel.

Turn Tess into a tale of sentimentality and a certain romantic weight must be given to the male leads, a mistake Polanski gracefully avoids. Neither Leigh Lawson nor Peter Firth makes any lasting impression opposite Kinski. It’s easy to hate Alec, but it is not as simple to fall in love with Angel. What was initially intended to be jarring — the moment when Angel turns his face from Tess and tells her that he can no longer love her — becomes almost irrelevant; we cannot wait to see Kinski’s lips take the news. We might have done worse just to see this woman react.

Disillusioned, Angel insists that she return home to her parents while he goes on an exploration of South America alone. Thus abandoned, Tess searches for work so as to support her ailing father and hungry family, and somehow manages to run into Alec. England was never so small as when it rested in the lens of Polanski’s camera.

Alec’s manipulative attempts to win her back disgust Tess, but when her father’s death pushes the Durbeyfields into abject poverty, she desperately secures Alec’s financial help by becoming his mistress — just when Angel returns to beg her forgiveness. Strangely enough, their reunion is anticlimactic; I might blame the unconvincing passion between them on botched chemistry.

Even when they have finally escaped Alec and roll around like feral children on the floor of an unoccupied house, we cannot believe in them. Neither does Tess, apparently, since she allows herself to be captured by the police roughly 48 hours after murdering Alec.

In Polanski’s vision, key conflicts take place outdoors, their outcome as foggy as the landscape; tents, however, represent a stalemate, a meeting of two equally determined forces. Thus Tess meets Alec for the first time in his pleasure pavilion on the lawn of Lady d’Urberville’s manor, while later on the impoverished Durbeyfields take shelter in a churchyard behind the fluttering curtains of Mrs. Durbeyfield’s four-post bed. In this world a group of young women frolicking in the fields to celebrate May Day with flowers and dancing is as solemn as a funeral procession, and a dank crypt offers comfort.

Here, the odds are equal for destruction and restoration, and often one will not take precedence without inciting the other. Safety is rarely found indoors. Violence, but also an uneasy sort of love, originates in forests and on plains. Tess observes a noble hunting party chasing through the mist, an illusion nowhere near as haunting as her own experiences.

There is nothing more difficult than making an old story new, because there is nothing as untrue as the assumption that good stories remain relevant forever. You must find a fresh face to play ancient vices and virtues as if they have never been played before. Most of the time, though, all it takes is the experience of stigma to understand a classic. That Polanski saw himself in the heroine, shunned by society and struggling to regain her virtue, is certain. Could it have been any other way? Could it have been any other woman?

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Abi Morgan’s drama The Hour. You can find her website here.

"To Be Continued" - Evidence (mp3)

"Crash" - Evidence (mp3)

"It Wasn't Me" - Evidence (mp3)

The second studio album from Evidence, entitled Cats & Dogs, was released on September 27th.