Word: film
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...Poitras, it's important to try to understand al-Qaeda - something the U.S. government "still doesn't quite know" to do. "They feel a bit at a loss understanding what the threat is," she says. Perhaps that will change if and when the film is released in the U.S. - she's trying to secure a distribution deal for the spring. If anything, the movie is sure to garner attention...
That mortal warning - Trust No One, possibly including yourself - is posted in nearly every movie made by Roman Polanski, 76. From his debut work at the Polish Film School, a one-minute shocker called Murder that showed a sleeping man being stabbed to death in his apartment by an intruder, to his new thriller The Ghost Writer, Polanski has plumbed the themes of isolation, persecution and claustrophobia. In 1963 Polanski gained international attention, and a TIME cover, with Knife in the Water, which trapped two men and a woman on a small boat to play out their sexual rivalries...
...simple terms, a man who keeps remaking his own movies - then Polanski is the very auteuriest. Even if he weren't drawn to pictures about hunted, holed-up men, he could hardly avoid the connection between iconography and autobiography, for his life is at least as notorious as his films. As a child, with his Jewish parents in concentration camps, he survived the Nazis by hiding and running. In Hollywood, his blond starlet wife Sharon Tate was slaughtered by Charles Manson's own Satanic gang. Then, after his great success with the knotty, despairing Chinatown (still his best film), there...
When Polanski hooked up with the novelist Robert Harris, best known for his Roman fictions Pompeii and Imperium, for a film version of Harris's roman-a-clef The Ghost, he might have felt that the book had been written from his own recipe for paranoid suspense. It's the story of a writer of celebrity lives - a magician's best-seller, for instance, titled I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered - hired to add some marketable pizzazz to the memoirs of Adam Lang, a retired British Prime Minister of the Tony Blair stripe. He's called in on this rush...
...plot of the book and the film is also weirdly similar to that of this weekend's other new film, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, which has a stranger visiting a rainswept island near Boston after someone's mysterious disappearance and trying to unravel a conspiracy that may threaten his life. That picture - with a gallery of unreliable characters weaving a web of lies around the baffled hero, who must discover the perpetrator by searching for clues in hidden notes - has been widely compared to Hitchcock and film noir; but it might also be Scorsese's tribute to Polanski...