Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director.
Polish auteur Roman Polanski’s full length film debut, Knife in the Water, is both surprisingly reminiscent of his later, more fully developed films and strangely different. A graduate of the National Film School of Łódź (not to mention an orphan and Holocaust survivor), Polanski already had a brace of short films under his belt by the time his black and white thriller arrived; his senior thesis Two Men and a Wardrobe had even won multiple festival awards in Europe. His star was on the rise and it must have seemed all but inevitable when his first feature landed him an Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Film, superstar status among Polish filmmakers and even a Time Magazine cover.
But does Knife stand up as a film, not simply as the debut of a famed and controversial director? It’s terse, nearly minimalist and surprisingly socially conscious, especially considering his later blockbuster success in noir homage and horror. It’s also clearly the work of a student straight out of film school. Which is not to say it’s clumsy; in fact, Knife shows the formidable skills of a filmmaker with a masterful control of mise en scène and comfort with thesis-like themes. It’s that deliberate approach that demonstrates Polanski’s relative inexperience; for all his talent, at this point he’s still utilizing a student’s toolbox rather than pushing forward. The construction of the cinematography demonstrates a student’s necessity for pragmatism, the socio-economic themes show a idealistic (or possibly opportunistic) necessity for weighty subject matter and even the film’s plot is highly reminiscent of existential theater.
Said plot is almost ludicrously simple: a middle-aged man and his wife drive to a lake for a day and night of sailing when they come upon a young hitchhiker and, after a sudden game of chicken, decide to pick him up. But this isn’t The Hitcher or a simple slasher movie. Despite the ominous presence of the titular knife (belonging to the unnamed hitcher, played by Zygmunt Malanowicz in his own debut), almost no overt violence occurs throughout the film. Instead, Knife portrays struggle of a different kind, that between the young and the old; the older Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) continually strives to dominate the hitchhiker, while the younger man angrily tries to prove his mettle. Conflicts arise over the smallest trifles (the propriety of whistling on a ship, properly sailing technique) and larger ones (the interest of the lone female aboard is frequently but not exclusively implied), until they simply become irreconcilable.
Knife rests somewhere between extended metaphor and social commentary. It’s easy to view the animosity between Andrzej and the hitcher as a symbol for almost any struggle: young and old, wealthy and disenfranchised, old Europe and new Poland, haves and have-nots. The broadness of its conceit manages to encompass all of these (with a little prejudice from a viewer), but that same breadth lessens its own impact. Instead, the film works better simply as a study of the base human struggle between two males, each needing to prove himself a little better than the other. That the struggle takes place over both the elder man’s wife (Jolanta Umecka) and a sailing ship named after her is not particularly subtle.
But while Knife may not be a particularly subtle film, it is a powerful one. Polanski’s already significant filmmaking skills carry many a scene that could either be overdone or simply dull; his ability to fill a single shot with each of the three characters in cramped perspective makes amazing use of the claustrophobic surroundings. Similarly, his restrained use of dialogue and staggered, slowly-told anecdotes from his characters make what could seem like typical art house fare into something angry, disquieting and beautiful. The final forbidding, magnificent shot of the film, of an automobile poised at a crossroads in dim light, is a point so blunt that it takes true talent to make it cutting and wonderful.
by Nathan Kamal
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