Word: polanski
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Rosemary's Baby. This Polanski effort, made back when Mia Farrow was still Big Frank's wife, is simply awful film fare. The case of the beautiful young actor's wife who bears the child of the devil, with the aid of the creepy people downstairs and tanin leaves, is just boring--the sense of horror builds so slowly the movie passes like a bad dream. Farrow gives a jittery, flittery performance; I leave it to you to place the blame--can she act, or is it merely what she has to work with? This film goes over like...
...Chinatown. This is the only film made in American in recent years which compares in insight and emotional power to the Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s. (I include the work of Robert Altman). Polanski turns the traditional detective film on its head. Chinatown is really about the education of Jack Nicholson, who as the film develops learns more and more about the structure of power in Los Angeles, but discovers that the more he knows the less he can help Faye Dunaway. A very pessimistic perspective, but very effective...
That head in the sand waiting for a nouvelle vague belongs to Film Director Roman Polanski. Playing guest editor for the year-end issue of the French Vogue, Roman wanted the shot, taken by his friend Harry Benson, for the cover. But Vogue's regular editors overruled him. "They told me," he says, "that the ladies who buy Vogue would run away from my cover." But Polanski still managed to express himself inimitably across 53 pages. Among his features: an annotated gallery of his leading ladies (Faye Dunaway is "the grande dame of the screen") and six pages...
There is never any doubt that Trelkovsky will take over not only the living quarters of the previous tenant but her fate as well. Polanski is not interested in surprise endings: those visitations across the courtyard may be predictable, but they are all the more chilling because of that...
...hard to determine, as it often is with Polanski, what in the movie is genuinely frightening and what is just cynical. It may be that this, after all, is a separation impossible to make, and that Polanski's distinctive vision is rooted as much in glibness as in genuine darkness. The Tenant, then, would stand as perfect, typical Polanski, a dank joke, a nightmare in jester's dress...