Two Men And A Wardrobe (Dwaj Ludzie Z Szafa) runs fifteen minutes, is loaded with homosexual subtexts, and has a very Beckettian feel to it, as two weird men lug around a piece of furniture through various scenes. It is not unlike Laurel and Hardy’s famed film, The Music Box. Polanski, himself, unconvincingly plays a tough guy who beats the men up, perhaps prefiguring his later cameo role in Chinatown. The Lamp is only seven minutes long, and plays out like a Polish episode of The Twilight Zone, where a doll maker’s shop houses dolls with a life. They come alive only once he leaves, and a mysterious force sets the building on fire as the inhabitants cry out in their doom.
When Angels Fall (Gdy Spadaja Anioly) is the longest short, at twenty minutes, and is the first film to have any color in it. They come in flashback reverie sequences of the life of the film’s protagonist, an elderly female lavatory attendant. It is probably the best of all the shorts, even in just the brief scenes of World War One, the only time Polanski ever referenced the World Wars in his work, until The Pianist. The Fat And The Lean (Le Gros Le Maigre) sees Polanski as barefoot slave to a fat man, and chained to a goat. It is a definite artistic step backwards from the three prior shorts, and runs about fifteen minutes.
The final short is Mammals (Ssaki), and plays out against a stark, white wintry background, as two men argue over duties and who will pull their sled. It runs for ten minutes, and, while derivative of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, is better than The Fat And The Lean. It was also his last short before Knife In The Water was made, with the approval of the Communist regime in Poland.
Knife In The Water not only is a preview of many of the obsessions that Polanski would return to throughout his career, but was remade, three decades later, as Dead Calm, Nicole Kidman’s film debut, which also starred Sam Neill and Billy Zane. That film was far more predictable and Hollywood than Knife In The Water.
What separates Polanski’s film from such an inferior remake is his virtuoso composing of scenes. Given the place where most of the film takes place, the fact that he uses the traditional painter’s triangular composition of his characters serves as both inspired novelty and homage, as well as being in line, spiritually, with much of the New Wave filmmaking that was taking over European cinema at the time, with its quasi-documentary feel. Yet, Polanski also shoots many of the scenes from unexpected angles, which disorients a viewer. In one scene, we see the youth holding his finger up to the mast and closing one eye, then the other. Then we see the mast and finger switching relative positions, as if from his perspective.
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.