Knife in the Water(1962)

Knife in the Water(Polish Title:Nóz w wodzie 1962),Roman Polanski’s first feature is a brilliant psychological thriller that many critics still consider among his greatest work.The first Polish film to be nominated for a Foreign Language Oscar.

The story is simple, yet the implications of its characters’ emotions and actions are profound.It features only three characters and deals with rivalry and sexual tension.This Film established him as a filmmaker to be reckoned with, winning top honors at the Venice Film Festival, a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination, and a place on the cover of Time in conjunction with the first New York Film Festival. Polanski's career-long fascination with human cruelty and violence is already evident, as is his intense interest in exploring the complex tensions involved in close relations.

An upper class man, Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk), and his wife, Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka), are driving down a country road of Poland in a luxury car. The man is obviously annoyed with his wife's driving, going so far as to yank on the steering wheel at one point. Krystyna stops the car without a word, gets out and walks around to the other side of the car. Andrzej slides over behind the wheel. He might as well drive in actuality, since he's intent upon driving virtually anyway.

Andrzej speeds on down the roadway and, spying a hitchhiker in the road, refuses to slow down or stop until the car is very nearly on top of the lad. Andrzej hops out of the car to berate the lad (Zygmunt Malanowicz), but finally agrees to give him a ride. Andrzej and Krystyna are on their way to a lake to spend the day sailing on their private sailboat. Andrzej takes every opportunity to belittle the young man, while showing off his own athleticism and competence for the benefit of his attractive wife. In fact, Andrzej so enjoys using the lad as fodder for his machinations to inflate his male ego, that he invites the boy to join them for a day on the lake. The lad comments, "I knew you'd call me back. You want to go on with the game." Andrzej replies, "You're not in my class, kid." Sure enough, Andrzej is an expert sailor and the lad inexperienced on the water, so the opportunities for Andrzej to excel and instruct are numerous. "I'm at the helm. You can't take over," says Andrzej. Though the young man has less need to dominate, he is nevertheless determined to assert his independence and the advantages of youth. "I could try," he responds. Later, the boy proves agile enough to scamper up the mast of the boat and is particularly adept with the switchblade that he carries.

For her part, Krystyna occasionally tries to placate the rivalry between the two mismatched men, but mostly quietly ignores them. When she tries to blunt her husband's verbal assaults, he simply becomes more fired up by her sympathy for his rival. The boy comments that it is noon, but Andrzej corrects him, saying, "It's ten past." Krystyna points out that the young man doesn't even have a watch, which makes his estimate from the sun's position rather astute. As the film progresses, Krystyna gradually makes herself increasingly attractive, by the expediencies of removing her glasses, letting down her hair, and donning a scanty, two-piece bathing suit. As her sexiness becomes more overt, it stokes the competition between the males. Some of the more pleasing aspects of her curvature begin to find their way into the foreground of the film frames, tantalizing members of the audience as well. The two men on the boat begin to look more and more like adolescents posturing for dominance, rutting rams, or male peacocks in display.Nobody really ever threatens anyone - at least not directly - but the tensions that develop aren't easy to analyze or categorize, even by the trio themselves.Tension between the men intensifies, with the pocket knife that represents the hitchhiker's particular skills lending a continual suggestion of violence and sexuality to the goings-on. Things eventually do get violent.

Equally impressive is Polanski's mastery of the camera.It's still the best description of the director's supremacy: at any given moment, Polanski's camera is always where it wants to be.In an interview. Polanski ,While discussing styles, he voices his hilarious opinion of the Dogma film movement (paraphrase): "I'm allergic to Dogma, all that shaky camera nonsense. It looks like the cameraman has Parkinson's Disease, or maybe while filming he's masturbating."

Camerawork is by Jerzy Lipman(http://www.cinematographers.nl/GreatDoPh/lipman.htm)

Many of the shots include both elements of the boat (in the foreground or middle ground) and views of the water, sky, woods, or marshes (in the background). The juxtaposition of the claustrophobic atmosphere on the boat (which had once belonged to Herman Goering) with the expansiveness of nature all around gives symbolic emphasis to the inability of the characters to escape their psychological limitations despite the beautiful openness of nature all around them. The weather cooperated miraculously with the filmmakers, often mirroring the changes in mood among the characters. The phallic straight lines of the mast and riggings seems to express the excess of testosterone on board ship while the open serenity of the landscape reflects Krystyna's calm and quiet influence.

By the use of deep focus and clever selection of camera angles, many of the frames include all three characters, with one in the foreground and two behind, constantly emphasizing the triangular nature of the interpersonal dynamics. Many of the shots are unusually tight in, adding to the tension. For some of the shots, the cameraman had to be tied to the mast because of the cramped quarters on board the sailboat. A cameraman was likewise tied to the hood of the Mercedes for some of the shots near the film's opening. The inclusion of the eight Polanski shorts in this treasure trove helps to illuminate how the director came to be such a master at expression through images. All of the shorts were shot without sound in accordance with the policy of the Lodz film school, which aimed at ensuring that the students would first learn to tell their stories visually. What little sound occurs in the short films was dubbed in later. Polanski later became known for his naturalistic camera, which seems to come upon the action by chance, as it is happening, and the first indications of that style are already in evidence here.

The three cast members for this film had extremely different levels of qualification and experience. Leon Niemczyk was an experienced actor and gave the film its grounding with his solid and intense performance. Zygmunt Malanowicz was fresh out of acting school and, according to Polanski, still stuck on method acting. Since the role is that of a neophyte, Malanowicz's lack of experience added a degree of verisimilitude. Polanski later dubbed in his own voice for Malanowicz's character. Interestingly, the Internet Movie Database states that it was because Malanowicz's voice was a strongly developed bass, but Polanski states, in his interview included on the Criterion release, that Malanowicz's voice was too high-pitched. Either way, the voice we hear in the film belongs to Polanski. Jolanta Umecka had no acting experience. Polanski scoured the local pools for a young woman with the right look for the part. He found it extremely difficult to get Umecka to react the way he wanted her to for the various plot developments. Nevertheless, her lack of "acting" served the part reasonably well, providing the implacability that her character needed to manifest. More importantly, perhaps, she had all of the physical attributes necessary to excite the required level of machismo on the part of the men.

Filmed in black and white, this film is extremely assured, concise, and telling in its characterizations. KNIFE IN THE WATER is also notable in the career of another Polish filmmaker, co-scenarist Jerzy Skolimowski (http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/os_skolimowski_jerzy),

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Skolimowski ) , who had already begun to direct, but emerged internationally in 1982 with the offbeat MOONLIGHTING. Some would argue that KNIFE IN THE WATER is a more interesting movie than any Polanski made in the west after leaving his native land. Brilliantly told and well-acted, Polanski's half tongue-in-cheek, lugubrious and sinister filmic style seemed quite refreshing at the time.

With its oblique but unrelenting psychological violence, politically charged nihilism and incisive visual forms – the images in this film, like the knife of its title, will cut you if you get too close and this film is not only one of the filmmaker’s best films, the only feature he made in his home country and native tongue before emigrating on towards fame and infamy and back towards fame again, but also one of the most enervating treatises on human relationships committed to celluloid.

Roman Polanski had intended to take on the role of the young hitchhiker himself, but Jerzy Bossak, head of the Polish film unit KAMERA (under whose auspices the film was made), turned him down because he didn't consider the director attractive enough. The character's voice, however, is Polanski's, who later dubbed the part over. Zygmunt Malanowicz had a strong, developed, bass voice, which was quite inappropriate for the character.

Though commonly classified as a thriller, Knife in the Water is less of a suspense film than it is a terse and cynical drama about marriage. The final scenes reveal what this has all been for. If the pick-up sticks game was the combination, the ending is the lock opening. Polanski chooses not to show us any decisions on the part of the couple, but rather to leave them stuck in between. Do they trust each other anymore? Did they ever? Has this all been a game to add a little spice to the stew? Or is this truly where two people bored with each other end up?

A must watch Movie.