Dark Women and Weak Men
The masculine-feminine dichotomy forms a core of Polański’s films – in many, it also becomes the motor of the plot. Some accuse him of misogyny, while others see the pictures he creates as a proclamation of the superiority of the mythical Woman.
Inarguably, women in Polański’s films frequently represent the world of darkness. A young smuggler played by Emanuelle Seigner in Frantic (1988) becomes Harrison Ford’s guide through dangerous Parisian nightlife, and in The Ninth Gate (1999), the demonic Green-eyed time and again saves poor Corso (Johnny Depp) from trouble. In Bitter Moon (1992), a young woman mutilates her older lover. It is also a woman who pulls at the strings of political intrigue in The Ghost Writer (2010), and in Venus in Fur (2013), a feminine protagonist symbolically castrates the man.
The sexuality with which Polański saturates his films is intertwined with violence and death. Already in his Film School exercise, A Toothed Smile, lust triggered evil in the protagonist’s psyche. The topic would return in the director’s later works, with Death and the Maiden probably the boldest example. Although it is not quite a successful picture, it is an almost clinical record of Polański’s obsession. In the film, sex is a means of executing violence (the torturers rape the main character, and years later she gags them with her underwear), and Eros and Thanatos embrace tightly in a disturbingly seductive dance.
The strong women of Polański’s films repeatedly break free of the established order, while the men are either slaves or cynical manipulators. In Tess (1979), it was men who defended social convetions only to mask their own lust. In Death and the Maiden, the need of revenge felt by the leading feminine character was pacified by masculine exigencies in a systemic order.
In his article devoted to Cul-de-Sac, the critic Michał Oleszczyk noted:
Women are not exactly protected in the director’s universe (as they often meet with drastic violence), but they seem to possess a natural superiority over the masculine kind. Whether it’s Lady Macbeth or Rosemary, in the end, their instinct of surviving elevates them above the Y chromosome owners. (...) Although throughout the film she seems to have been the victim of a conspiracy, in the last scene Rosemary accepts the role of a mother, and her tender smile has something triumphant about it – even the devil will be subject to her will and depend on her care.
Life in the Works, Works in the Life
For years, Polański seems to have led a peculiar game with both the audience and critics – he would toy with his own biography and speak about himself in a seemingly open manner, only to soon afterwards hide under masks of form and an imaginatively artificial world. Following the premiere of Bitter Moon (1992), he stated in an interview:
Creating films is like taking an X-ray of the soul, so of course it’s all about me. But the way in which they [journalists] see this is simplified, naïve and idiotic.
Even if most psychological interpretations flatten the oeuvre of Polański, there were times when the cinema proved therapeutic for him, and became a means of conducting a dialogue with himself as well as the audience. When the director's wife, Sharon Tate (nine months pregnant at the time), was murdered by Charles Mason's followers in 1969, along with three of their friends, the press went as far as blaming Polański for Tate’s death, arguing that hiring satanist leader Shandor LaVey as a consultant for writing the script of Rosemary’s Baby provoked the crime. Polański, who never ceased to regret being absent on the day of the murder, decided to respond with a film. He quit working on the Day of the Dolphin – a project that he was preparing with Jack Nicolson – and began to make Macbeth (1971). In this adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, he made a desperate attempt at reflecting on his wife’s death. It remains one of the strangest, most shocking films of his career, and received very mixed reviews.
The Samantha Geimer Case
Polański was arrested in the U.S. in March 1977 and charged with seducing and raping Samantha Geimer, a minor then named Samantha Gailey. After a year’s battle in court – of the judge's abuse, Polański recalled that 'I was treated like a mouse that a huge bored cat simply plays with' – he fled the U.S. hours before the official proclamation of the sentence, never to return there again. Public opinion in the U.S. turned against him, and he toyed with it by shooting Tess in France. The story, based on the novel by Thomas Hardy, depicts a 16-year-old who is taken advantage of sexually by one of her rich older relatives.
Polański was detained by Swiss police in September 2009 at Zurich Airport while trying to enter Switzerland, in relation to his outstanding the 1978 arrest warrant in the U.S. He was on his way to the Zurich Film Festival, where he was to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award.
He spent months in house arrest in Gstaad. Polański later conveyed the sense of besiegement in his film The Ghost Writer. The film was created in 2010, starring Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor, and met with very enthusiastic reviews. It received the European Film Award, the Silver Bear of the Berlin Film Festival, as well as four Cesars.
Memories of the Holocaust
'If I only got to have one roll placed on my grave, I would like it to be The Pianist', replied Polański when asked which of his movies he values most. While filming the memoirs of Władysław Szpilman, Polański saturated the picture with remembrances of his own. The scene in which Szpilman (Adrien Brody) finds a can with cucumbers among the rubbles and ruin echoes the wartime fate of Polanski’s mother. The film also brought to life memories, after decades, of his father’s arrest by SS officers, a woman shot by a German solider, and children led out of the camp barracks...
The Pianist is not the only film in which he reflected his childhood traumas. In Oliver Twist (2005), Polański conveyed the fate of an orphaned boy trying to survive in a hostile world. The early short Mammals (1962) captures one of Polański’s most intense memories. The man who walks in solitude among the snowy fields echoes the time of waiting for his father’s return from the Mauthausen concentration camp.