Word: polanski
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WHAT TESS needs is an introduction by Alistair Cooke. He'd lend Roman Polanski's lush adaption of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles an appropriately ceremonious mood, sitting in his studio library, staring down his Coriolanian proboscis and solemnly intoning "Fate deals the cards with the deck stacked against you...and you must play out your hand. Fate moves you like a pawn across the chessboard of life. Fate..." In Polanski's hands, Hardy's tragedy is like an extravagantly produced episode of Masterpiece Theater, the sauntering tale of a country lass victimized by forces beyond...
...Polanski seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of Thomas Hardy. Hardy rebelled against the genteel tradition in Victorian literature. His novels describe violence, poverty and, particularly, sexuality with startling candor. He scandalized the literary classes with his disdain for repressive society, his grim mockery of propriety. His works were bold, cynical, and for most of his audience, shocking--not unlike the more familiar work of film director Polanski. Perhaps it was their shared obsessions with the impervious force of Evil, the cruelty of the bourgoisie, and the sudden, unpredictable groin-kicks of Fate that initially attracted Polanski to Hardy...
...Director Roman Polanski, who cast her in Tess, she is the "new Ingrid Bergman, a supernova." To Alberto Lattuada, who directed her in Stay As You Are (1980), she is "a mixture of poison and nectar." more the latter at the box office. But to her own mind, German-born Nastassja Kinski, 20, is, like her actor-father Klaus, simply, "a professional." Asked to close-crop her luxuriant locks for Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart, the actress instantly complied. "I do whatever the role requires," says the now almost tressless Tess. -By Claudia Wallis...
Tess seems to be more an act of atonement than of creation, Roman Polanski's way of saying he's sorry for his scandalous reputation and his status as a fugitive from American-or at least Cal-ifornian-justice. He is telling the world that underneath it all, he is really a very serious fellow, if by serious one means that he is as capable as Irving Thalberg or David O. Selznick or any other old time mogul of making a handsomely illustrated version of a literary classic...
...emerges from his endless version of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles with a sense that one could have read the book in a shorter span and had more fun too. There is no question that Polanski's images-with Brittany doubling for "Wessex"-are frequently striking. He does less well by Tess, the poor doomed girl who, forced to rise above her station by family ambition, is ruined by a rascally wastrel and then misunderstood by the prig to whom she gives her heart. Everyone the director sets to moving through Wessex clumps along...