Roman Polanski | Bouquets & Brickbats

17/08/17

Darren Aronofsky is always an interesting filmmaker, but he can be inconsistent. Requiem For a Dream is, in my opinion, a morose and devastating masterpiece, while The Fountain is clumsy and ineffectual. Black Swan definitely goes onto the ‘good Darren’ pile, while Noah is… er… probably best slipped under the carpet. mother! has polarised audiences like no other film in recent history. I find myself fascinated by the plethora of reports on social media from disgruntled punters claiming that it is the worst film they have ever suffered through – people so incensed they seem to be on the verge of stringing up the cinema staff for daring to show such guff.

Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) lives in an octagonal house in the middle of nowhere, with ‘Him’ (Javier Bardem), a celebrated poet, currently suffering from a terrible case of writer’s block. We learn fairly quickly, that the house has, at some unspecified point in time, suffered a devastating fire and Mother is single-handedly attempting to return it to its former glory. While she mucks in with the paintbrushes and wood filler, her poet husband sits around and broods. But then the doorbell rings and we are introduced to ‘Man’ (Ed Harris), a creepy fellow with a consumptive cough, who claims to be a doctor. Mother is instantly suspicious of him, but the poet welcomes him in with open arms and invites him to stay. It isn’t long before Man’s surly wife (Michelle Pheiffer) turns up and starts to treat the house like her personal property, smoking cigarettes indoors and snogging her hubby at every opportunity. But the strange visitations don’t end there. Soon, the house looks like the worst Airbnb invasion in history, with people arriving in droves… and then Mother discovers she is pregnant…

Aronofsky’s camera seems to be caught up in a major infatuation with Lawrence. When it’s not looking her straight in the eye, it’s peering voyeuristically over her shoulder, and following her from room to room, as though it can’t bear to be parted from her. I love the fact that the film takes off at a sprint and barely pauses for breath, as event piles upon event and the whole thing careers headlong into madness.

Look, I appreciate that this won’t be for everyone – but neither do I buy the story that it’s some kind of an insult to the intelligence. In look and tone, the film it most resembles is Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby – it inhabits a similar world of paranoid speculation, Mother constantly aware of things going on behind her back, against her wishes, but unable to assert her authority. It’s an allegory, for sure, but one that drags in so many potential allusions that you can literally discuss it for hours. There’s the spectre of fame and what that can do to relationships: the way that some men feed off their partners in order to fuel their creativity. There are biblical references, observations about immigration and the way people selfishly protect their own space. And of course, there’s the subject of birth and what that does to a woman, how much it demands of her and what determination it takes to see it through to fruition.

Maybe what ultimately turns so many viewers off is the fact that all these references are there and all of them are relevant. Perhaps most people prefer to have things cut and dried – to identify exactly what the filmmaker is saying in a movie and then walk away feeling pleased with themselves. But there’s a lot to be said for allowing people to arrive at their own interpretation of what the film is actually about. Everybody will have a different view, and it’s no bad thing. In my opinion, when sorting out Aronofsky’s films, I genuinely feel this one belongs on the ‘good Darren’ pile – and that the term ‘Marmite Movie’ was probably never more apt than it is here.

One thing’s for sure. Watching this, there’s one thing you definitely won’t be. Bored.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney

17/12/14

In his private life, Roman Polanski has incurred the wrath of many people. He’s also the cinematic genius who created masterpieces like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown. It’s often hard to weigh these two truths against each other. Can we really judge him only on his work and conveniently blank out what he gets up to in private? You’d have thought that in his current state of disgrace, he’d stay well away from films of a questionable sexual nature, so what are we to make of Venus In Fur, a movie whose very raison d’être is to stir the murky waters of human sexuality? Based on the play by David Ives, it’s a two-hander, which is played out in a deserted theatre and as with his previous movie, Carnage, Polanski has made no real attempt to ‘open it up’ for cinema viewing. To further cloud the waters, the film stars Emmanuelle Seigner (or as she’s sometimes know, Mrs Polanksi) and Mattieu Amalric, an actor who bears a strong physical resemblance to the director. What was Polanski trying to say here? Is this intended to be some kind of vindication of his personal life? It’s hard to say but surely these things cannot be mere coincidences?

Amalric is Thomas, a writer and director, who has just been auditioning a series of actresses for the lead role in his titular play, an adaptation of the infamous novel by Baron von Sacher Masoch (from whom the word ‘masochism’ derives.) We join Thomas at the end of a fruitless audition, where he’s expressing his hopelessness at ever finding a young woman capable of playing his heroine, Varda. Then a woman stumbles into the theatre, a woman with that very name, who begs him for the opportunity of a quick read-through with him. Tom is reluctant at first, but eventually succumbs to persuasion and quickly begins to realise that not only is this Varda very accomplished in the role, she seems to know an awful lot more about him and his work than he might have expected. As the actors become subsumed into their respective characters the sexual politics swing back and forth as they struggle for supremacy…

First of all, both Seigner and Amalric offer nicely nuanced performances and the onstage antics aren’t anything like as overt as you might have supposed. There’s little in the way of nudity and the film has comfortably managed a 15 certificate. The script veers from clever and incisive to occasionally rather clumsy (some vague hints that Seigner’s character might be supernatural are never really consolidated.) Ultimately, the film is fatally skewered by a sudden (and frankly rather risible) ending that undoes much of the actors’ best efforts to make this unwieldy contraption fly. It’s by no means awful, but neither is it in the same league as Polanski’s best work and this one should be filed under ‘interesting failures.’

3.5 stars

Philip Caveney