This article appeared in
the
Chicago Reader on March 27, 1981.
Directed
by Roman Polanski
Written
by Polanski, Gerard Brach, and John Brownjohn
With
Nastassia Kinski, Peter Firth, and Leigh Lawson
Tess,
Roman Polanski’s film version of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the
d’Urbervilles, has
pleasantly surprised a sizable class of filmgoers who have never
awaited
Polanski’s coming projects with bated breath. Polanski has
combined critical
and commercial success before with Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown,
but he
belongs unmistakably to that group of quirky personal artists with
whom the
public and the critical establishment never feel entirely
comfortable. If Tess
is doing anything to change his reputation, it is because
audiences have been
able to appreciate it as a movie movie instead of as a Polanski
movie. By
contrast, hardcore Polanski fans (including myself) are generally
passing the
film off with faint praise and scrambling for ways to relate it to
the rest of
his career. Tess is not the first perplexing Polanski
film, but it is the most
perplexing if one tries to locate Polanski’s stylistic concerns
beneath its
placid surface.
Polanski’s
earlier films seem to have little in common with each other except
their
dissimilarity to Tess. If one takes as the core of his
work the turbulent
dramatics of Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth, and Chinatown,
and somehow manages to
make a stylistic synthesis between these films and the absurdist
vein of Knife
in the Water, Cul de Sac, and What?, one
still must account for the
watch-and-wait enclosure films Repulsion and The
Tenant, and the
uncategorizable The Fearless Vampire Killers. Still,
despite the diversity of
this list, it’s not impossible to pick out some common elements.The most noticeable
characteristic of
Polanski’s style is the frequent use of forced opposition between
the
foreground and background of his compositions, emphasized by the
use of
wide-angle lenses that distort the visual field in order to keep
both
foreground and background in focus. Polanski usually puts further
emphasis on
the relationship between foreground and background, sometimes by
creating a
proliferation of detailed background action, sometimes by using
conspicuously
barren landscapes. The feeling of many of Polanski’s most
characteristic
moments grows from the conflict between dramatic narrative events,
which throw
emphasis onto the characters, and a visual style that shifts
emphasis to the
background, that constructs a universe irrelevant to or
insensitive to the
foregrounded characters. The reason for Polanski’s wide-angle
style, and the
reason that he gravitates so naturally toward absurdism, is his
desire to
display the dislocations and discrepancies in his material
simultaneously
rather than alternately. (A good illustration of this principle is
Polanski’s
tendency to compress narrative transitions and capture the
resulting shifts of
tone within single, brief shots - for example, Faye Dunaway’s
rescue of Jack
Nicholson at the old-age home in Chinatown, or Charles
Grodin’s betrayal of Mia
Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.) Even in such relatively
low-key, uneventful films
as Repulsion, the environment is an active presence in
Polanski’s films, and no
element of the film universe, including the characters, receives
attention in
and of itself. It is worth remembering, as one approaches Tess,
that Polanski’s
has always been a metaphysical cinema; the relationship between
people and the
world is not observed in social or psychological terms (either of
which would
imply that the world is of interest only insofar as it affects
people), but in
philosophical terms.
Most
of the obvious elements of Polanski’s style are absent in Tess;
if the film
relates stylistically to the rest of Polanski’s career, it is in
subtler ways.
One’s first impression of Tess is that it recreates with
fair accuracy the epic
style that for all intents and purposes vanished with the 60s. The
story begins
with ne’er-do-well Jack Durbeyfield’s chance discovery that he is
descended
from the vanished aristocratic family of d’Urberville; he and his
wife decide to
send their eldest daughter, Tess (Nastassia Kinski), to seek the
favors of a
moneyed family that adopted the d’Urberville name because no one
else had
claimed it. The film almost seems to flaunt its flair for
meticulous
19th-century period recreation, moving from the opening scenes of
a girls’
society’s outdoor dancing party to the drab working class environs
of the
Durbeyfields to the greenery and splendor of the
pseudoaristocratic
Stoke-d’Urbervilles, each setting evoked in loving detail. But
period recreation
in itself is not new to Polanski - whose attention to background
detail has
admirably suited the requirements of the period film in The
Fearless Vampire
Killers, Macbeth, and Chinatown - and the
resemblance of Tess to the epics of
the 60s is not simply a matter of art direction. It is more
directly a result
of a clearly articulated narrative style that amplifies the
important events
and turning points of a character’s life, and expands and
contracts the time
scale of the film in accordance with the biographical importance
of scenes and
transitions. This mode of narrative is a radical departure for
Polanski; one
would have thought it alien to his concerns. But even at the
outset, there is
no danger of mistaking Tess for a David Lean movie;
Polanski plays each scene
at a cool distance, usually in long-take medium shots that work
against the
dramatic structure of the scenes. The forced wide-angle
perspectives of the
earlier films are gone, but Polanski still shows an affinity for
foreground-background opposition that keeps the characters and the
environment
in juxtaposition.
As
the film unfolds, the acting supplies more evidence that
Polanski’s approach to
the subject matter is not as conventional as it may first appear.
Tess is given
a job managing a poultry farm at the Stoke-d’Urbervilles’ through
the efforts
of son Alec (Leigh Lawson), whose unwholesome designs on Tess are
all too
obvious. At Tess’s first favorable response to Alec’s overtures,
he rapes her;
she stays on with the Stoke-d’Urbervilles for a while longer as
Alec’s
mistress, but is soon overcome with guilt and returns home, where
she bears
Alec’s child. The baby dies soon after birth, and Tess goes to
work at a dairy
farm and meets the second man in her life, Angel Clare (Peter
Firth), a pure-hearted
chap whom Tess cannot quite bring herself to tell about her past.
They marry,
and Angel proceeds to evoke the audience’s boos and hisses by his
callous,
brutal reaction to Tess’s wedding-night confession. Both male
characters are
extraordinarily unsympathetic, and although Polanski hasn’t really
manipulated
the narrative to stir up the audience’s ill feeling, one still
feels that
neither man had to come off as quite such a bastard. The reason
our reactions
are so unmitigated is that the acting - all of the acting in the
film - has
been systematically flattened to one dimension. Lawson and Firth
are not
exactly caricatures of the rake and the prig; their performances
are in no way
exaggerated. But the performances suggest no other qualities
besides rakishness
and priggishness, modulated though they be. Kinski’s performance,
too, is
strangely remote and uninflected. Her role is that of a person who
endures, and
despite the variety of emotions that Tess goes through, the
keynote of
endurance is the only aspect of her character that Polanski
stresses.
It
eventually becomes clear that what Polanski is trying to do is
eradicate the
entire psychological basis of the story. I don’t want to blow any
more of the
plot than I already have, but the rest of the film is devoted to
dramatic
emotional and psychological changes, and Polanski withholds each
of them from
the viewer, usually by simply sending the character off somewhere,
out of the
reach of the narrative. It is somewhat easier to understand why
Polanski is
doing this than it is to appreciate it. Most of his earlier films
employed more
sophisticated means of shifting our attention away from pure
psychology; here
he simply makes it go away. In the past, Polanski would subtly use
the twists
of a careening narrative to emphasize a world at cross-purposes to
the
characters’ psychological concerns. But here, for whatever reason,
he has
started with a narrative style completely devoted to biography, a
style that
leaves the characters alone on center stage. Only the most daring
psychological
ellipses enable him to keep the characters’ psychology from
becoming the focus
of the film, and to transform the film into a detached,
philosophical
observation of the random patterns of a life. (In this light one
can imagine
why Polanski has left behind his wide-angle distortions. Such
visual effects
were always his way of vigorously asserting the presence of the
environment in
order to put psychology in context. In Tess, there is no
psychology, and no
such assertion is necessary.)
My
feeling is that Polanski has not laid enough groundwork for us to
accept his
stripped-down characters. The difference between a successfully
stylized
character and a boring character is the film’s ability to make us
accept a
given level of abstraction; Polanski’s attempts to suggest an
alternative to
the psychological approach seem to me too mild. Perhaps the
initial decision to
use an epic, biographical narrative style was a bad one given
Polanski’s
demonstrated stylistic interests. He reportedly feels that Tess
is his best
work, so it remains to be seen whether it marks a turning point in
his career.
Fortunately,
Tess has received enough acclaim that most filmgoers will
get out to the
theaters and make their own judgments, and I can give short shrift
to my duties
as a consumer consultant. My misgivings about the project
notwithstanding, it
should go without saying that any Polanski film is sprinkled with
enough
moments of expressive art to make attendance mandatory for anyone
who loves
movies.