Yet, she does so only to control the youth and spite her husband, for she reviles the hitchhiker for being from a different class than she is. She then drops him off near shore, and makes it back to the dock, where Andrzej is waiting, having swum to shore. The couple gets ready to drive home, and Andrzej is fearing having to report the youth’s death. Krystyna then tells him the truth, that the youth is alive and she cuckolded Andrzej with him. Andrzej does not believe her, or perhaps he does. Either way, she has now seized the upper hand over her conflicted spouse. At a fork in the road, with one way headed home and the other to the police, the car is motionless as the film ends in an ethical quandary, as Krystyna has come to dominate both men.
The DVD package comes in two disks. The first disk has the film, but no commentary, although it does have a nearly half-hour long interview with Polanski and co-screenwriter Jerzy Skolimowski (the third co-screenwriter was Jakub Goldberg). There are also some production stills, but not even a theatrical trailer. There is no English dubbing of the film, and only rewritten subtitles by Polanski, but they are in Criterion’s standard white format, which bleaches out against the high contrast whites of a black and white film. Also, a significant portion of the film is untranslated, which means subtexts that a Polish speaker could get are lost on readers of the dialogue. And not all of the untranslated words are obvious things, like names or putdowns by one character to another. This is a major shortchanging of the audience by Polanski.
The second disk’s features are also spare, and the whole package could have easily fit on one disk. Overall, the whole package is a bit of a disappointment. This second disk contains eight film shorts Polanski made between 1957 and 1962. They are Murder, Teeth Smile, Break Up The Dance, Two Men And A Wardrobe, The Lamp, When Angels Fall, The Fat And The Lean, and Mammals. One slight downside is that neither the fast forward nor rewind features work with this disk, but this was apparently a bizarre request made by Polanski, which detracts from the overall DVD package’s quality.
Murder (Morderstwo) runs just over a minute, is silent, and shows a stabbing in a bedroom. Teeth Smile (Usmiech Zebiczny) is also about a minute long and silent, features a lot of naked breasts, and a leering Peeping Tom. Break Up The Dance (Rozbijemy Zabawe) is a very Roger Corman-like scenario, and seven minutes long. Some thugs crash a party and cause havoc. It is the first short with sound and dialogue.
Article comments
1 - Mat Brewster
Nice review. I watched this a couple of weeks ago and found it mesmerizing. I really loved all the tight shots inside the boat. Good stuff!
2 - bliffle
It's a fine movie. Available from Netflix, too.