Hello,
I take a little free time to write and this time I am here to talk about movies for a change!
In recent weeks I have seen several movies in quick succession by Polanski. It is a filmmaker I like especially since my tender age. I have often wondered why, but I think I can now move forward a few reasons: first because it has dabbled in all genres, from horror to psychological drama, the film suits the pure comedy Each of his films bears a particular mark and all these impressions, a film to another, creating a powerful work, talented and unique. I often watch a movie to tell me that it would could be done by someone else without that it shows ... but some filmmakers, including Lynch, Scorsese, De Palma, Polanski could not be exchanged. Some films
Polanski I entered the head and I was never left. Their images are there, intact, when I close my eyes. So it is with those of Tenant . I saw him recently but many of its sequences were still imprinted on my retina, almost fifteen years after seeing it for the first time. The strength of this film is writer in me a willing prey, such as the bewitched victim offering his neck. I accept the credits soon to follow where it leads me his camera, knowing that the journey will be neither easy nor always happy surprises that will be gruesome and that I will not reach the shore in the serenity of the generic end. I accept all this by playing a spectator, but mostly because he manhandles his audience, Polanski moved him more. If I tell you so you remember to Pianist and the poignant figure of a man stumbling through the gaunt ruins of Warsaw.
But I could also talk about the plight of Trelkowski screaming, too nice tenant stifled by the wickedness of its neighbors, or Tess, bravely following the road that destiny soap for her.
I could even add the look of Carol at bay, the young manicure Repulsion , although when she committed the first murder and we know the danger, the compassion that it inspires the troubled ... repulsion, exactly.
Polanski is certainly one of the best filmmakers have talked about the loneliness and anxiety it generates.
Vertigo around in circles in an apartment, look out the window hoping that someone will speak kindly, will seize the silent signals that your body emits unnecessary. His heroes are often deeply alone, eaten from within by the silence of the soul that just decide suddenly strange and frightening sounds of objects, animated or inert matter: the young and Carol will it with more more deeply into the sounds that surround it, the drop of tap water not closed to the echoes of the street.
If they are alone, these characters are not only emotionally. Sometimes they even have someone in their lives, as Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby , or someone who wants to enter, as the boy who loves Carol patient and pay dearly ... Their solitude is complete. She is social, psychological, emotional and sometimes political. Their situation cutting more ... or would do such other malicious confining them in themselves to madness, even robbing them of the urge to flee?
What is certain is that the hero is most often polanskien alien status in the community where he lives. In Repulsion, Carol manicure lives in London with a French accent while his sister spoke perfect English, and her dread of men shut up in distress without words. Trelkowski is a naturalized French Polish everyone insists on dealing in foreign accent and brands. American tourists Frantic is even more desperate than nobody understands in Paris. About Wladyslaw Szpilman, the pianist, the Nazis made him an outcast in his country. Status of foreign natural consequence of misunderstanding, contempt, rejection. But sometimes, the character is a hacker community of which he understands how these mechanisms because the shudder ... Rosemary is the case, discovering slowly that its neighbors are nice a gang of Satan worshipers who were trapped.
Or Gittes, the detective Chinatown, which advances the plot in which all have rotten related party a real swamp.
As the film progresses from one revelation to another negative, the hero joins polanskien solitude where he is confined to the malevolence of the group that rallied around him and against him. From there the plot takes shape: they want to silence, reduce to thank you, to steal her baby, raped again and again, to exterminate. But the Machiavellian genius the filmmaker is almost always to preserve the ambiguity: his character is he mad? He slipped, you it imagines the conspiracy, or is he the only one to hold a truth unbelievable? On one film to another, Roman Polanski has more or less always the same story: an individual is manipulated by a group within which he is abroad. More or less naive when the film begins, his eyes are opened slowly and he understands the full scope of the trap in which he struggles. But according to the film, the camera hovers like a needle between these two poles: real conspiracy from the outside, schizophrenic delusions the hero. In Repulsion , it is clear that the balance from the beginning to the madness, even if madness can not be hard to explain everything to Carol. There are things we know, White led the tragic young woman at the stage where the audience got to know him, at which point it is probably already too late. This film has everything from a clinical case study, even if it misleads the viewer to design a scenario of horror movie.
In most movies, however, Polanski plays perfectly the ambiguity by using the subjective camera: everything we see could be seen by the hero. We discover the plot through his eyes, which has two advantages of size for a filmmaker adept at outwitting of the viewer: first, we position ourselves instinctively "side" of the hero: we are with Rosemary, with Gittes, with the pediatrician Frantic , including when it took the runway most likely (that of a kidnapping) to explain the disappearance of his wife in a hotel in Paris. We are willing to believe what they believe. But in a second time, this identification allows suspicion to burst at a time selected by the director, and in Rosemary's Baby , we convince ourselves that gradually Rosemary is manipulated by his neighbors with the help of her husband.
It seems clear that she was drugged, raped, made pregnant by dark forces. We convince ourselves that it is surrounded by wizards, and even her obstetrician belongs to the sect. It was then that Rosemary is trying one of these "false leaks" cherished heroes polanskiens, ie a leak that proves a cul de sac. She takes refuge with another gynecologist, who receives it. She begins to explain in detail everything he arrived, the whole plot, and suddenly his words seem the most crazy, crazy, here we are in the skin of the doctor who listens and says she suffers from a paranoid depression linked to maternity. The question then arises in the minds of viewers: they have been abused? Rosemary is she crazy? She thinks these things?
In Lessee , this ambiguity between insanity and paranoid conspiracy is even more striking. Take a shy young man with Polish accent, charming and uneventful. He rented an apartment and tries to gain acceptance by a community of hostile residents. But little by little, he is convinced that people want to put the building in the shoes of the previous tenant, Simone Choule, which ended up defenestrate. Everyone seems to conspire against him, the nice bartender coffee opposite its owner intransigent. Spy on the people, the bully. Then he starts seeing things that do not exist, the real and the delirious mix so intrinsically at the end of the film, the viewer confused would be hard to decide what caused the loss of Trelkowski , malice concerted its neighbors or its own psychosis.
Fiction is by far the best way to tell a conspiracy. Take a crowd that says "white" and one who yells "black!". In terms of objective truth, the majority tends to prevail ... unless, by means of a work of fiction, you take the viewer (or reader) by the hand and have attached the beginning of the poor not to "fool" who swears that others are lying. So you are willing to believe that this man is right against all. And even if this truth is stifled by the powerful, it will forever remain between one who has ... and you. After the last image Chinatown, the bitterness that now you share with Detective Gittes drag on in your mouth.
And you complain of poor Rosemary, his lucidity and courage have done more than tie a doom.
To conclude, I could not but speak of Pianist . For if there is a truth that was most difficult to believe, and some still are bent on denying, it is that a conspiracy to eradicate an entire people, to the point that it remain no trace of the millions of victims. This perfect crime, we known, experienced some failures that allowed the truth to gush. But again, only fiction has the power to bind us to one of those people who were gradually excluded from society, ghettoized increasingly narrow, private rights and dignity, before being driven to the cul de sac of Auschwitz.
As if all his films had to lead us to it, and all the plots to the Holocaust, The Pianist staged the first polanskien hero who manages to truly escape: through music, but especially for the first time, thanks to the solidarity of other positive human brothers.
that, I leave you, and if you want to see some movies that I just mentioned, do not be shy! Except Frantic , which is a bit dated, Polanski's filmography through time without a wrinkle and it is a pleasure to revisit it.
soon ...
Gaëlle
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