If you love film, you know the first Polanski project, "Knife in the Water." It is a simple project: a couple, plus an extra man, confined on a boat. Sex.
It is an important project, taking the seat of the characters and extending it into a space around them. The challenge for the actors is to project out into a haze that surrounds them. It only works because the space is confined, incidentally in a boat. Orson Welles conceived the idea but his project was unfinished. Polanski finished it.
Polanski's project was told from the perspective of the couple. Presumably the man is a lawyer with his out-of-law wife (his mistress). It is all about laws of various kinds.
Now imagine a project with the identical approach but told from the point of the drifter. What is his story? What is his haze?
Watch the two together if you dare. This time around we have a more ostentatious art: beautiful staging, terrific lighting, hazy score. Absolutely controlled and contained acting. And yet at the same time we have the haze extending to grit, humanity, sweat, rutting.
This time around that reality gives us more explicit and human sex. And more explicit law.
You need to watch this, folks. It is intrinsically deep and engaging. Slow. Meditative. As with a Rembrandt, the meditative but intense emotion draws you into the haze, here shown many times as shadow (or coal dust, or water).
One of our most serious actresses is Ms Tilda. I'll watch anything she chooses to throw herself into.
Ewan chooses intelligent projects. You will discover that our drifter is a writer trying to do something different. It is why things are so hazy and non-linear, the typewriter underwater. The one explicitly folded shot quotes his "Moulin Rouge" folded typing.
If you want to understand how actors put themselves on their skin, then their sweat, then the haze around them that is shared, then into your own haze... watch this.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
