**** BITTER MOON
Directed by Roman Polanski Written by Polanski, Gerard Brach, John Brownjohn, and Jeff Gross With Peter Coyote, Emmanuelle Seigner, Hugh Grant, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Victor Bannerjee, Sophie Patel, and Stockard Channing.
“No–not exactly.”
“It wasn’t the same, I tell you. You can’t bathe twice in the same river because it’s never the same river–nor the same bather.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Moreover, What? received the same sort of apoplectic critical rejection in some quarters as Bitter Moon has, no doubt for related reasons. Back in 1973, the International Herald-Tribune reviewer was so beside himself that he got the title wrong and reviewed What? as Why?, and in the New Republic last month Stanley Kauffmann, reviewing three recent Hugh Grant films, referred to Bitter Moon as “swill,” ranking it far below Three Weddings and a Funeral and Sirens.
In short, you might say Polanski has certain things to feel hopeful as well as bitter about: he may have a reputation as a pervert and be unable to return to the United States, but he has also remarried and recently become a father. All these things are clearly inscribed in Bitter Moon, a film that seems virtually driven by a desire to settle Polanski’s various accounts–entailing an autocritique that’s as ruthless and scathing as any committed to film, a portrait of Polanski’s own macho perversity calculated to produce shudders.
Each time we return to the events on board, in between Oscar’s chapters, the situation between Nigel and Fiona shifts correspondingly, as Nigel becomes more and more attracted to Mimi. So it’s clear early on that Oscar’s tale isn’t an idle amusement: it’s a narrative with immense consequences, and part of the film’s immense power as story telling is to convey this sense of urgency. You might say that like musicians Oscar and Polanski are playing on our uneasy curiosity, and the piece they’re playing is a four-part symphony in sonata form, complete with theme and variations. (Readers who don’t want any plot points given away are urged to check out here.)
Where do we, as spectators, stand in relation to all this? I can’t vouch for the responses of women–this is essentially a tale told by one man to another, albeit one where the two women register much more sympathetically than the two men. But my guess is that male and female viewers alike stand in many places in succession, most of them pretty unsettling. And of course the shipboard machinations that surround these four movements, holding them in place and sometimes altering their meanings, offer another tense form of narrative striptease, mocking Nigel’s responses and our own while contributing a mordant counterpoint to the serial flashbacks. (At the climactic New Year’s Eve party on the ship, the increasingly cadaverous Oscar sports a fez–a final third-world reference in this account of the Ugly American abroad, exercising his much-vaunted freedom.)
