Knife in the Water

WELL,you can defined this great film just by one particular scene: the old man is rich,have good social position and took the boy on board to play the role of his mentor.However the young man was dragging the beautiful knife,which was_as he claimed_ the most important thing in his life.The guy was always playing the knife between his fingers and the old man was jealous about that.So when the boy went inside the yacht leaving the knife,the old man took the knife and tried to do the same.Suddenly the young appear and saw this.The only way for the old man to get away with some honour was to allow the boy do the play:he played the knife between the old man's fingers,looking straight into his eyes.Well the lady at the same time was swimming using a funny rubber cocodrile.So, imagine this beautiful scene with the knife,all the tension and suddenly we hear the woman shouting:'Andrzej, Andrzej,the cocodrile is making the bubbles',huh,when I was in the cinema the whole audience burst laughting after hearing that!. The woman stays in the background, just think why? There's another great funny shot when the woman lays there for a sunbathe with her small bikinis,well, her breast dominates the scene!. is the waving movement of the yacht who creates the sensual scene!.

Of course this scene was part of the longer plot ,the critics described this `knife scene' as the most famous and symbolic scene in all of Polanski films..Zygmunt Malanowicz,the actor who played the part of the young man said that he practice a lotnfor those scenes,polanski was afraid if he was prcticing long enough,finally everything was Ok.As Leon Niemczyc,the actor who played the mature role said" Malanowicz only gave me sligh scars'.The idea of the film was the strange competition between this two men.the jury and the prize was the woman.Polanski said he needed a actress that looked plain and normal in ordinary dress but intriguing in bikini!.

Polanski was not only interested in this kind of personages,he likes the relantionship between' the master and the servant' The domineering and the repressed ,as we can see in his short film' The Fat and the Lean' (1961, B&W, 15mins) or in features like Knife in the Water (1962); Cul-de-sac (1966);Dance of the Vampires(1967) etc.

There is nothing more thrilling than discovering a natural filmmaker for the first time. There are only so many, and you can only have menarche once. Its an introduction into another life.

I first saw this in 1965 at the Orson Welles Cinema near Harvard Square. We were told it was made behind the backs of Iron Curtain thugs, only surviving because of international attention. (I wouldn't meet Tarkovsky or Kieslowski until later.) And that it was made by the fellow who had made the striking "Repulsion," which at that time was anticipated but yet unseen in the States.

I've since learned some striking things: that both Polanski and his co-writer wanted to play the hitchhiker and indeed it is Polanski's voice. And that the mistress who seems only half alive was in fact played by a non-actress they found by looking at swimming pools. Also that the situation was suggested by a long planned and discussed Orson Welles project ("The Deep") that was started after this and never completed.

The writing is good of course, especially the central image the title denotes, but the camera finds the perfect place always. It is like Altman's camera (after this) that discovers the action rather than, say Spielberg's where the action is obviously happening in such a way to be cleanly seen by the camera. And so much harder on a boat!

But the interesting thing about such an introduction to a filmmaker is the relationship that follows: we know certain things about how he thinks and sees. We expect the conversation to continue and mature over the years. And what a rocky ride this man has taken us on, through perfectly created worlds (in which I include "Ninth Gate") but also through pure dreck and rank sentimentality (both of which tag "The Pianist").

Sometimes he's internal to the narrative, even the charmed actor. Sometimes he is outside the narrative, pulling strings (as with this film) but sometimes it is clear he never got out of bed.

As with Kubrick and so many others, you really must start at the beginning, which essentially means here.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Roman Polanski's first full length feature is a simple, minimalist piece filled with male posturing, dead end situations, claustrophobic environments and eerie calm. This is part of Polanski's art house beginnings, but many of its themes and much of its style would be carried through to his later, more accessible work.

Like many a Polanski picture, Knife in the Water shows us men competing over a woman. Typically however this is to the end of making the men look ridiculous rather than objectifying the woman. Here the competition is the central theme, and the bulk of the film is basically a series of set pieces in which the middle-aged husband and the young hitchhiker attempt to outdo each other or show the other up. This drama is concentrated and focused by having only the three characters, and confining the action almost entirely to one location. This kind of minimalism is a safe, simple way to make a straightforward, uncluttered story – a good strategy for an up and coming director – but it's a lot harder to make a really great picture out of such simple elements, and the young Polanski does fall somewhat short here.

What Polanski does have is his natural talent and feel for cinematic form. His sense of rhythm was evident from his earliest shorts, and by this point he had clearly settled upon a style of slow, even paces, letting scenes take as much time as they needed and never being afraid to hold a shot into so-called "dead time" if he felt it was necessary. Often, the stillness of Polanski's pictures could build up a greater feeling of dread or tension than speed and shocks. Here, the pace is leisurely, in tune with Komeda's breezy jazz score, a sound synonymous with early Polanski. It may be slow but Knife in the Water has great atmosphere.

Another of Polanski's strengths was in his feel for space, particularly confined space. In Knife in the Water we have a kind of contradiction on this level, because a small boat in the middle of a lake is both a very wide open space and a small confined one. You kind of get half the effect of a later Polanski picture such as The Tenant – you do get the sense that the characters and the camera itself are incredibly restricted in their environment, but of course you don't get that feeling of all the walls pressing in on you. Nevertheless, Polanski was a master at creating this sense, and he does tend to surround the camera with bits of boat or actor. There are numerous close-ups – typical of the early Polanski although it's something he would drop later in his career – which give a slightly surreal look to some of the shots. A particularly effective moment is the first shot of the boat drifting out across the lake with trees dotted in the background, which then cuts to a close-up of Krystyna, the wife, lying on her back filling the lower half of the frame, with the exact same background as the previous shot.

Knife in the Water is a fairly good film with some good ideas. It suffers a bit from style over substance but is well acted and well directed and is not long enough to get overly tedious. Better things were to come from Polanski once he moved out of Poland and began his English-language film career.

I liked this film more than I thought I would. Perhaps this was because the last Polanski film I saw was REPULSION--a technically well-made but repulsive film (that few average people would ever want to see). It is a very simple story with only three characters but manages, somehow, not to bore the viewer or give in to what is expected. For example, when the couple met the hitchhiker, I expected the old cliché of the "psychotic drifter" who would ultimately terrorize and/or kill them. But, as the film unfolded, I kept waiting and waiting and waiting and he never dismembered or terrorized them at all. In fact, one of the OTHER main characters turned out to be the jerk! Now that's interesting.

Why not an even higher score? Well, the ending of the movie just didn't make sense. The nasty husband jumped overboard to try and rescue the drifter but the husband appears to have drowned. BUT, when the wife and drifter take the sailboat back to shore, the nasty husband meets the boat!!! How could this have happened unless maybe there was a submarine in the lake that rescued him?! My daughter thinks maybe he could walk on water, but that's a pretty rare occurrence. This is a pretty big mistake, now that I think about it--and it's a shame since the rest of the movie is so good.

ADDENDUM--I received a message on IMDb from Chris-Krzysztof indicating that this was NOT the way the film ended. His post is given below:

"I guess you missed something in the subtitles or there was something "lost in translation". After having searched the boy for some time the couple thinks he had drowned, they have a fight and when the husband disappears, he's not searching the boy anymore, but he's swimming to the shore to a police station to confess what happened (mostly to prove his wife he's not a coward). In the morning, they meet at the shore (the husband of course didn't have enough courage to go the police, he's making excuses that it was in the night, he was almost naked, couldn't get into the car - the keys were on the yacht). When they leave the marina, he stops the car at the crossroads, where we can see a sign (not sure if it was translated) "Do posterunku MILICJI obywatelskiej, 10 km" (To the POLICE station, 10 km). And the car remains there, so we don't know which way he chooses ... "

As I responded to him, in the version I saw, this is not how the ending was translated. Considering I think Chris speaks Polish, I am sure he is right. However, many older films exist in multiple versions and translations and I think the version I saw was mistranslated. As a result, I am adding this addendum to clarify things.

In Polanski's feature debut, "Knife in the Water," strange power games were again to the fore, with ridiculous macho rivalries arising when a young looking man hitches a lift with a sportswriter and his attractive wife… Though the plot itself is slim, the film is distinguished by Polanski's precise visuals, which point the shifts in allegiance between the three characters through subtle groupings; impressively, although almost the whole film is situated on a small yacht, the effect is always cinematic rather than theatrical…

Polanski's film is implicit, ingenious, mesmerizing, and has artistic integrity… It is filled with a very different sort of suspense… There is no violence… The suspense is hinted at, suggested, refined tautly, glimpsed, did-he-mean-what-I-think-he-meant?

The rich man's confidence was in his possessions, among which was numbered his attractive wife, lying in bikini, teasing by arousing expectations between them on the deck… The student's confidence, casual, almost unaware, was in his very being... The husband resented the youth, the strength, the "cool," the easy virility of the student and worked out a compulsion to keep challenging them, to try to show his superiority…

Polanski was fair – each had his own strengths and skills; but the one obsessively resented the others