Roman's Repulsion (and other stuff) (Roman Polanski Box Set (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Roman Polanski Box Set (DVD)
Date:	23/04/09 (173 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: One great film, two good ones

Disadvantages: The sound quality on one of the films isn't great

This is a four-disk set available for less than £10 from amazon or ebay at time of writing.

Roman Polanski was one of the most consistently interesting directors of the 60s and 70s. Since then - since his trouble with the law - his films have been wildly variable, but it's safe to say that any director who made Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown belongs in the pantheon of all-time greats.

This set contains all of his black and white films from the 1960s: his first three features and a collection of shorts. The short films - eight of them - are on disk four. Some are obviously student films - they're completely silent and less than two minutes long. Others have a bit of money behind them. They are insubstantial, although they all at least look good, and even in his earliest, cheapest work there's an interesting, faintly surreal visual sensibility at work.

But it's the long films that are important. Knife in the Water (1962) was Polanski's only Polish feature, and it launched him on the international stage. This is the era in which American and British cinephiles were always looking for the latest hot arthouse director from abroad - Polanski was following in the footsteps of the likes of Fellini and Bergman. As much as the art, these foreign films were popular because they tended to flash a bit of boob, and true to form, Knife in the Water has some brief, rather tame nudity.

A successful man and his younger wife pick up a young hitchhiker. They're off for a day's sailing on their yacht, and they take the young man along with them. The two men rub each other up the wrong way, and it's only a matter of time before their macho competitiveness takes a darker turn.

This has the same plot as several later horror movies or thrillers, but it's neither. It's more like a Harold Pinter play without the humour as the male characters circle one another warily, trying to gain the upper hand, while the woman looks on unimpressed. The husband obviously treats his (really rather pretty) wife as another possession, a status symbol like the yacht and the car; he wants to show off to the younger man and is patronising and bullying. But the young man has a flick knife, and may not be quite the pushover hubby thinks he is.

It's beautifully shot and the direction is very (self-consciously) 'interesting', trying to make each shot unusual and memorable. This, coupled with the jazzy soundtrack, makes the whole thing feel like a calling-card from an ambitious director desperate to get out of Poland. It worked. But I found the story a bit unengaging, a bit too calculatedly arty in its ambiguity. Still, the yacht is a good location, and the three actors are very good. Annoyingly, some of the dialogue isn't subtitled. There's a 30-minute documentary about the film's making, which is a bit stodgy.

Polanski ended up in London, where he made two films for Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger, who'd made a fortune importing foreign arthouse flicks and marketing them as smut to the dirty-mac brigade. The first was Repulsion (1965), in which a sexually repressed beautician descends into insanity when she's left alone by her sister.

This is a classic horror film, and probably the first to try to be realistic about mental illness. Carol isn't a Norman Bates style psycho, she's a young woman who is very ill, probably the most sympathetic murderer seen in film up to that point. Over the course of a fortnight or so, her grip on reality completely dissolves. Although she ends up killing a number of (rather unpleasant) characters who don't recognise her for what she is, you don't hate or fear her. Catherine Deneuve gives a fantastic performance as the wide-eyed, vacant, almost catatonic Carol, very beautiful and convincingly mad. There's good, sleazy support from Patrick Wymark and Ian Hendry (who resembles David Frost).

It's wonderfully photographed, with the flat where Carol lives looking more and more unearthly as things progress. It has one of the best shock moments in film history and is easily the best film in this set. And it has another great jazz soundtrack. The sound level on the DVD seems a bit low, though. There's a decent 25-minute documentary among other extras, and a commentary that I didn't listen to.

Repulsion was a huge artistic success, and made money too. So Polanski made another film for Tenser and Klinger, Cul-de-Sac (1966). A thuggish American gangster and his badly injured friend hole up in a castle in Lindisfarne belonging to an intellectual and his hot French wife.

This is a lot like Knife in the Water; again, a well-to-do couple are interrupted by lower class intruders. Again, though, despite having a classic thriller plot, this is played as a peculiar comedy, very like Pinter or even Beckett. It never really feels like George and Teresa, the couple, are in real danger from Dickie, the thug (which makes it a bit hard to take when violence does occur). Instead, Teresa taunts George for being ineffectual and unmanly (we know from the start she's unfaithful, although there's no attraction between her and the criminals); George has a hilarious crisis of confidence about his lifestyle; and Dickie gets increasingly impatient waiting for his boss to come and rescue him.

It's beautifully shot and makes excellent use of its odd location. There are plenty of weird touches (there are chickens everywhere!) and, like Repulsion, it makes everyday things seem just a bit weirder than usual. The acting is flawless, with Donald Pleasence hogging the screen as George, Lionel Stander making you quite quite like Dickie, and Francois Dorleac very sexy (and sometimes naked) as Teresa (she was Catherine Deneuve's sister; tragically, she died young). But although it has a few great scenes of nightmarish comedy (especially when some awful houseguests arrive unexpectedly) it doesn't really sustain the comedy and is a bit unsure of what it's trying to be. Worth seeing once, and likeable enough, but not quite classic.

Sadly Cul-de-Sac didn't make much money. Polanski's next film was The Fearless Vampire Killers where he met Sharon Tate, who's famous for the wrong reason these days. Michael Klinger went on to produce Get Carter, while Tony Tenser set up Tigon, one of the best British exploitation companies.

This set is worth owning for Repulsion, which is a true classic. The other two films are three-star efforts, definitely worth a look but not things that you'll need to return to often. For the price, this is well worth picking up.

Summary: Polanski's first three feature films