The Perils of Polanski
WEIL, HENRY
On Screen THE PERILS OFPOLANSKI BY HENRY WEIL Roman polanskis What? is wholly unpredictable-and that is not to be taken as a compliment. Structured as a picaresque journey (the most difficult...
...and even attempts a passing jab at astrology (the girl asks Alex what sign he was born under and he snaps back, "lobster...
...In an important sequence, for example, Alex takes the heroine to a deserted beach and, without warning, begins to dig...
...Lying in bed, he wheedles the heroine into exposing her body to him, but this triumph turns out to be his last...
...In Electra Glide in Blue, James William Guercio's directorial debut, it's pop...
...Guercio clearly intended to create an American legend with his first assignment?as, say, John Huston did with The Maltese Falcon, or as Orson Welles did with Citizen Kane...
...he lures her to his room, forces her to beat him...
...Sometimes it's just that simple...
...Of course, an overly predictable movie is no bargain either...
...Eventually, one realizes that there is no way to forecast what will happen next, that Polanski's anarchy is not funny nor his sex erotic, and that he is in fact denying us anything to look forward to except the end of the picture...
...Loveliness, that is, is wasted on the parasitic purveyors of modernism, who feel only contempt or perverse lust in its presence...
...Following this rather untoward experience, our heroine is taunted by decadent young toughs who loll about the villa, and learns that her room has been occupied by some newly-arrived American tourists...
...Fortunately, we can get up and leave the theater any time we choose...
...In a scene that is meant to define the state of modern art, a large painting by Gericault is delivered to the house, but is refused by the villa's administrator, who explains that where once Noblart preferred the image to the object, he now prefers the object to the image...
...And though he can be intimidated in a crowd (Wintergreen is human, after all), most of the time he is very brave...
...and finally ravishes her...
...There are sight gags, too, more often than not unfunny: The heroine shakes an antique clock she has carefully wound, only to have it fly into pieces...
...Once inside the house, this innocent abroad is led by servants (who speak no English) to a bedroom, where her shirt is promptly stolen...
...The objective of What...
...Next, a dark, mysterious man named Alex (Marcello Mastroian-ni) appears...
...is to describe the anarchy of modem art...
...The only real surprise the movie has to offer is its hero...
...The heroine, realizing that she might be unjusdy accused of murder, runs back to the highway she had fled at the beginning of the film, thus completing the circle...
...The movie ends with the girl, who lost her last shred of clothing in flight, climbing naked into a truckload of pigs...
...The clue to what he intends lies with the villa's mortally ill owner Noblart (Hugh Griffith), whose rooms are cluttered with modernistic paintings -from Van Gogh and Matisse to Rauschenberg and Dine...
...What?'s picaresque journey leaves us floundering, and we cease to care...
...Structured as a picaresque journey (the most difficult classic form to invest with meaning), the film races from one grotesque episode to another, leaving its audience as bewildered and unamused as its heroine...
...Putting the suit on, he starts to ask the girl absurd questions, which she doesn't answer correctly...
...Polanski, believe it or not, does have a point to all of this...
...To escape her attackers, the girl flees in a cable car down a precipitous cliff and arrives at a luxurious villa...
...But his apotheosis of Wintergreen is merely absurd...
...The girl's most striking quality is her attractiveness, and the attacks on her in the house of Noblart are really desecrations of beauty...
...Admittedly, it is easy, and may even be enjoyable, to sit through one such surrealistic episode, but an entire movie of freakish scenes is another matter...
...he receives an involuntary kick in the groin...
...He inserts occasional cinematic allusions (a dying man drops a round glass paperweight a la Citizen Kane...
...He slaps her, handcuffs her wrists to her ankles and proceeds to ask her more absurd questions...
...Noble art," in other words, has rejected perspective and selection to embrace objects unsullied by interpretation or expression...
...Polanski, interestingly, appears as one of the decadents, thereby counting himself among the world's modern artists...
...Two hours of enforced nonin-volvement is too heavy a price for the puny message of this film...
...In case these ribcrackers don't grab you, Polanski has tossed in a few jibes at the Church and organized religion...
...Regrettably, to get his message across, Polanski has felt it necessary to startle and batter his audience...
...Naturally, she decides he must be in love...
...Still, his is a lonely struggle, for every other law enforcer, it appears, remains a vainglorious cossack, and all civilians are invariably hostile to the police?the bigshots pull rank...
...To ward off prying eyes she attempts to close the draperies, but the curtain rod comes out of the wall...
...A priest who warns the young heroine to flee the villa because it is evil turns out to reside there himself...
...In the course of the firm, the girl is also whipped, has one leg panned blue, and-alter the villas administrator reads her diary aloud-Is jeered at by everyone...
...This choice, though, is a destructive one, as the heroine's mortifications demonstrate...
...while the cleric says grace before lunch, a character is shown reading the God-is-dead philosopher Nietzsche...
...One hopes that Guercio has now gotten all of the cinematic cliches out of his system and can get down to the real business of making a movie...
...To abandon noble art may be to live with swine, but it is unadorned beauty's only salvation...
...and when the priest tries to administer last rites to a person having a coughing fit...
...He finds, as he apparendy expected to, a buried chest containing an old policeman's uniform-although neither we nor the girl had any reason to expect him to find anything...
...She is, in short, a close relation to Terry Southern's Candy and the butt of a complex joke she does not understand...
...The vehicle for Polanski's latest venture into the bizarre is an anonymous American girl (Sydne Rome) traveling in Italy, who advertises her liberation by wearing a T-shirt and patched blue jeans...
...Guercio does seem kindly disposed to the hippies, who are presented as peace-loving and unfairly harassed, yet in the end Wintergreen is killed by one of them...
...Her whirlwind adventures begin with an attempted rape, the first in a long series of humiliations she is forced to endure...
...Nowadays, everyone expects a first film to have lots of close-ups, plenty of slow-motion and a wide-ranging soundtrack culled from classical music or from pop...
...All in all, Electra Glide in Blue is a product of easy cynicism, ham acting, overexuberant photography, and the Jack Webb School of Dramaturgy: Upon solving his first murder case, Wintergreen eulogizes, "Somebody died over loneliness...
...Modern sculpture intrudes everywhere as well...
...There is nothing, however, worth blessing in this version of America...
...As she endeavors to pass the animal, he tries unsuccessfully to mount her...
...There, she encounters a large black dog (who suggests the mythological Cerberus, just as the villa itself suggests Hell...
...Not uneducated (she plays Mozart on the piano, recognizes a Francis Bacon painting when she sees one, and knows that tigers aren't found in Africa), this ringleted blonde kewpie doll is nonetheless a sexual innocent-Stammering over words such as "hooker" and "prostitute," and reacting to carnal confrontations with astonishment...
...Ironically, it is beauty that ultimately causes Noblart's death...
...tourist (one initially sees the American wife as she smears her face with cold cream, turning herself into a clown...
...John Win-tergreen (Robert Blake) is a policeman, but, unlike the standard Hollywood cop of recent years, he has compassion and a conscience...
...The unnamed heroine cannot escape until the director is done with her...
...the losers cry injustice...
...God bless America, today," sings out the soundtrack at the final fadeout...
...and drops dead...
...For those who might not rind such entertainments altogether engrossing, Polanski has included a number of other, more marginal, diversions...
...a chambermaid, hoping to rid a room of insects, sprays shaving cream into the air...
...Left to sleep outside that evening, she no sooner dozes off than some-body steals her pants...
...This time, when she doesn't respond properly, he lashes her behind with a switch...
...This blatant appropriation of Easy Rider, with its contrived role-reversal, is actually funnier than it is shocking...
...takes incidental pot-shots at trite targets like the loud and vulgar U.S...
...Gazing lingeringly at her sexual parts, he gasps, "I had forgotten...
...Having photographed his cop-hero in silhouette, motorcycling around the natural wonders of the Southwest, he has a paranoid drug freak senselessly shoot him down from the back of a truck...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 21
