Knife in the Water would be an important film regardless of its quality, as the first feature film of a great director. It is, however, also one of the finest debut films you'll come across. This intense psychodrama cryptically examines the behavior of three individuals isolated onboard a small sailboat over a twenty-four hour period.

Historical Background: Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933, but his parents, who were Polish Jews, returned to Kraków when Roman was just three. When he was eight, his parents were removed from the Kraków ghetto and taken to a concentration camp, where his mother died. Later, Roman escaped from the Kraków ghetto just before it was destroyed. He took refuge with a series of Catholic families in the Polish countryside. Toward the end of the war, Roman survived by selling newspapers in Kraków and was finally reunited with his father at age twelve.

Roman received his first schooling at a technical school and took up acting at age fourteen. At twenty, he began attending the Polish Film School at Lodz. During his years in film school (1954-9), he appeared in a number of movies as an actor and made a number of shorts (which are included as extras with this Criterion release). The best known of the shorts, Two Men and a Wardrobe (1959), won five awards, internationally, including third prize at the Brussels World's Fair experimental film competition.

After graduation, Polanski spent his next two years in Paris, where he made the short called The Fat and the Lean (1960). Returning to Poland, he made the last of the shorts included in the present release, Mammals (1962), which was another award winner. He then made his first feature film, Knife in the Water (1962), which was the first Polish film ever to be nominated for an Academy Award (though it was beaten out for the trophy by Fellini's superlative 8 ½). This was three years before Repulsion (1965), which was then followed by such masterpieces as Cul-de-Sac (1966), Rosemary's Baby (1968), Macbeth (1971), Chinatown (1974), Tess (1979), Frantic (1988), Death and the Maiden (1994), and The Pianist (2002). Thus, the present Criterion two-disc, special edition release is a chance to observe the now-acknowledged master craftsmen refining his filmmaking skills.

Polanski has listed his primary artistic influences as Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Kafka, and Buñuel. Certainly one can recognize in Polanski's work Ionesco's taste for the absurd, Buñuel's playful surrealism, and Pinter's preoccupation with interpersonal tensions and power struggles. Knife in the Water may not be Polanski's most accomplished film, but the pared down structure and cast reveals Polanski at his most elemental. The film was not well received by Polish audiences and even less so by Polish officials. It lacked the requisite propaganda value. Polanski even had to remove the exterior shots of a Mercedes, which were thought to reflect a Western decadence that was inconsistent with official politics. More than any other factor, the contrast between the enthusiastic reception given the film internationally (it landed Polanski on the cover of Time magazine, for example!) and its cold reception by the restrictive Polish film industry is what convinced Polanski to take his skills abroad. Knife in the Water would be the last film made by Polanski in his native country. Knife in the Water is one of three films made by Polanski featuring the effect of an outsider on a couple, the others being Cul-de-Sac and Death and the Maiden.

The Story: An upper class man, Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk), and his wife, Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka), are driving down a country road of Poland in a luxury car. The man is obviously annoyed with his wife's driving, going so far as to yank on the steering wheel at one point. Krystyna stops the car without a word, gets out and walks around to the other side of the car. Andrzej slides over behind the wheel. He might as well drive in actuality, since he's intent upon driving virtually anyway.

Andrzej speeds on down the roadway and, spying a hitchhiker in the road, refuses to slow down or stop until the car is very nearly on top of the lad. Andrzej hops out of the car to berate the lad (Zygmunt Malanowicz), but finally agrees to give him a ride. Andrzej and Krystyna are on their way to a lake to spend the day sailing on their private sailboat. Andrzej takes every opportunity to belittle the young man, while showing off his own athleticism and competence for the benefit of his attractive wife. In fact, Andrzej so enjoys using the lad as fodder for his machinations to inflate his male ego, that he invites the boy to join them for a day on the lake. The lad comments, "I knew you'd call me back. You want to go on with the game." Andrzej replies, "You're not in my class, kid." Sure enough, Andrzej is an expert sailor and the lad inexperienced on the water, so the opportunities for Andrzej to excel and instruct are numerous. "I'm at the helm. You can't take over," says Andrzej. Though the young man has less need to dominate, he is nevertheless determined to assert his independence and the advantages of youth. "I could try," he responds. Later, the boy proves agile enough to scamper up the mast of the boat and is particularly adept with the switchblade that he carries.

For her part, Krystyna occasionally tries to placate the rivalry between the two mismatched men, but mostly quietly ignores them. When she tries to blunt her husband's verbal assaults, he simply becomes more fired up by her sympathy for his rival. The boy comments that it is noon, but Andrzej corrects him, saying, "It's ten past." Krystyna points out that the young man doesn't even have a watch, which makes his estimate from the sun's position rather astute. As the film progresses, Krystyna gradually makes herself increasingly attractive, by the expediencies of removing her glasses, letting down her hair, and donning a scanty, two-piece bathing suit. As her sexiness becomes more overt, it stokes the competition between the males. Some of the more pleasing aspects of her curvature begin to find their way into the foreground of the film frames, tantalizing members of the audience as well. The two men on the boat begin to look more and more like adolescents posturing for dominance, rutting rams, or male peacocks in display.

At one point, the three play a game of pick-up-sticks in the cabin, with the loser in each round having to pay a forfeit (remove an article of clothing). Andrzej is quite good at the game, which is obviously why he suggested they play. As the game is in progress, Andrzej also listens to a radio broadcast of a boxing match. Andrzej switches to an earpiece while the "losers" pay their forfeits. Krystyna's forfeit is to sing a song (as the young man fondles the slipper she's removed): "Joy has faded and our love's gone sour," she warbles. Her husband mutters, "Stupid song. I wonder who k.o.'d Molek?" The young man, however, is moved by Krystyna's plaintive melody. For his forfeit, the young man recites a sensitive poem.

SPOILERS AHEAD. SKIP TO THEMES TO AVOID.

Back on topside, Andrzej starts playing the skipper, ordering the young man to swab the deck. Tensions escalate to a critical point when the lad discovers that Andrzej has pocketed his knife. In a tussle, the eponymous knife plunges into the water. The young man angrily orders Andrzej to jump in after it, but in the ensuing struggle between the two, it is the lad who ends up in the water. He disappears from sight and, since he had earlier declared that he couldn't swim, Krystyna is duly alarmed. She swims to the buoy near where the boy went overboard, as Andrzej turns the boat about. There is no sign of the young man. Back on board, Krystyna scolds her husband roundly. He dives overboard and swims ashore to evade her critique. All the while, we observe the young man hiding behind the buoy, having faked his own drowning. After Andrzej is out of sight, the boy swims back to the boat. Now it is his turn to be chewed out by Krystyna: "You're just like him, only half his age and twice as dumb." Soon, however, with Andrzej out of sight and shouting distance, the two are making love, dissipating some of that sexual tension that's been building up over the last twenty-four hours.

After their tryst, Krystyna drops the young man off and he scampers across some logs to shore, well out of sight of Andrzej, who is across the lake. She sails back to the dock where Andrzej stands shivering. He is debating whether to go to the police, insistent that he is not afraid of them. Krystyna tells him he needn't bother. "He's alive," she says, "So much so I cheated on you with him." Andrzej, who can't imagine her choosing a mere pup over himself, accuses her of fantasizing. As they drive away, Andrzej reaches a fork in the road, where a sign points to the right for the police station. Andrzej sits immobilized, behind the wheel, uncertain which way to turn.

END SPOILER.

Themes: There are two interrelated themes in this film, one an implicit political one and the other an explicit psychological one . The political theme is class disparities. Underlying the conflict between Andrzej and the youth is the eternal class warfare between the haves and the have-nots. Andrzej has succeeded well enough to own a luxury car and a private boat; the young man walks and hitchhikes and owns only what he can carry in his duffel bag. Though such blatant differences were not supposed to exist in the communist society of Poland in 1962, they certainly did. Polanski took great joy in pointing out that one of the officials who had required the elimination of the Mercedes from the film drove up to the set, one day, in that very same kind of car.

The explicit psychological theme is the absurd macho posturing of alpha-male types. There's a certain amount of hostility that smolders beneath the surface for people at all times, but especially when sexual competition comes into play. Although the same kind of dynamics can develop between alpha-females (I've seen it at the University on rare occasions), it's far more likely in the testosterone fueled relationships of men. One need look no further than the comment sections here at Epinions for examples of writers, usually men, who feel compelled to assert their alpha-status. In Knife in the Water, Polanski has created a laboratory microcosm on a sailing boat, where he effectively strips away the respective personas to reveal the stupidity of all that male jousting. Krystyna watches the posturing of the two men with bemusement and the superior insight that comes from detachment, while Andrzej, by his own immaturity, finds himself both literally and metaphorically stranded at a crossroads.

Andrzej tells a story, over the course of the film (it's interrupted several times), about a drunken sailorman who breaks several empty bottles on a table and then begins dancing barefoot on the broken glass. He had done so many times before and was able to do so without problem because he was a stoker whose soles had grown hard from walking on coals. This time, however, he had been a year ashore and his feet had gone soft. The result was bloody awful. Krystyna had inquired, "Did he ever try it again?" to which Andrzej had responded, "No idea what became of him." Do men ever get too old for macho posturing?

SPOILER AHEAD. SKIP TO PRODUCTION VALUES TO AVOID.

What is Andrzej thinking as he tries to decide which way to turn at the film's end? He's got three options, none of which are good. If he goes to the police, he could be charged with manslaughter. If he turns the other way without accepting Krystyna's story, he emasculates himself by effectively admitting that he's afraid to accept the consequences of his own absurd behavior. If he turns away from the police station because he chooses to believe Krystyna's claim that the young man is still alive, he'll also have to accept that he's been cuckolded, pretty much as a result of his own stupidity. We can have no idea what becomes of him.

END SPOILER.

Production Values: One reason why the script for Knife in the Water succeeds as well as it does is its pared down scale. With just three characters appearing on screen in the entire course of the film and the action all transpiring in the course of a day, the story is a veritable chamber piece of psychological development. The idea of limiting the film to three characters was Polanski's but it was co-writer Jerzy Skolimowski who shrunk the timeframe down to just twenty-four hours. The two wrote the script over just a few long evenings of work, while playacting the various parts as they proceeded. Another reason for the success is that the story is driven entirely by the psychology of the characters. Even at this early stage in his career, Polanski had a fully developed sense of timing, expertly building the film's tension gradually but inexorably. On the surface, nothing very much seems to happen in this film, but beneath the surface, everything that is most important about the dynamics of human relationships is happening intently. The three characters are each fully developed psychologically, which is no mean feat for a film lasting just 94 minutes. Polanski is able to accomplish this because the psychological processes are as much revealed by the actions as the dialog. When, for example, the lad scampers up the mast, it proclaims his agility and virility, just as his knife and Andrzej's pipe symbolize phallic prowess. Superficially, Knife in the Water is reminiscent of the Hollywood film Dead Calm, starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Phillip Noyce, but Polanski is simply a superior master at parsing out the escalating tension.

The camerawork by Jerzy Lipman is superb and exceptional in a couple of respects. Many of the shots include both elements of the boat (in the foreground or middle ground) and views of the water, sky, woods, or marshes (in the background). The juxtaposition of the claustrophobic atmosphere on the boat (which had once belonged to Herman Goering) with the expansiveness of nature all around gives symbolic emphasis to the inability of the characters to escape their psychological limitations despite the beautiful openness of nature all around them. The weather cooperated miraculously with the filmmakers, often mirroring the changes in mood among the characters. The phallic straight lines of the mast and riggings seems to express the excess of testosterone on board ship while the open serenity of the landscape reflects Krystyna's calm and quiet influence.

By the use of deep focus and clever selection of camera angles, many of the frames include all three characters, with one in the foreground and two behind, constantly emphasizing the triangular nature of the interpersonal dynamics. Many of the shots are unusually tight in, adding to the tension. For some of the shots, the cameraman had to be tied to the mast because of the cramped quarters on board the sailboat. A cameraman was likewise tied to the hood of the Mercedes for some of the shots near the film's opening. The inclusion of the eight Polanski shorts in this treasure trove helps to illuminate how the director came to be such a master at expression through images. All of the shorts were shot without sound in accordance with the policy of the Lodz film school, which aimed at ensuring that the students would first learn to tell their stories visually. What little sound occurs in the short films was dubbed in later. Polanski later became known for his naturalistic camera, which seems to come upon the action by chance, as it is happening, and the first indications of that style are already in evidence here.

The jazzy soundtrack is by longtime Polanski friend and collaborator Krystok Komeda, who died shortly after working on Rosemary's Baby (1968) for Polanski, another tragedy for Polanski, in addition to the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, on August 9th, 1969, by Charles Manson and his cult followers, and the sex-scandal he brought on himself by seducing a thirteen-year-old aspiring actress in the home of Jack Nicholson (who was away at the time).

The three cast members for this film had extremely different levels of qualification and experience. Leon Niemczyk was an experienced actor and gave the film its grounding with his solid and intense performance. Zygmunt Malanowicz was fresh out of acting school and, according to Polanski, still stuck on method acting. Since the role is that of a neophyte, Malanowicz's lack of experience added a degree of verisimilitude. Polanski later dubbed in his own voice for Malanowicz's character. Interestingly, the Internet Movie Database states that it was because Malanowicz's voice was a strongly developed bass, but Polanski states, in his interview included on the Criterion release, that Malanowicz's voice was too high-pitched. Either way, the voice we hear in the film belongs to Polanski. Jolanta Umecka had no acting experience. Polanski scoured the local pools for a young woman with the right look for the part. He found it extremely difficult to get Umecka to react the way he wanted her to for the various plot developments. Nevertheless, her lack of "acting" served the part reasonably well, providing the implacability that her character needed to manifest. More importantly, perhaps, she had all of the physical attributes necessary to excite the required level of machismo on the part of the men.

The Shorts: The eight shorts included with the Criterion release were all directed by Polanski prior to his making Knife in the Water.

Murder (1957) and Teeth Smile (1957) are little more than film fragments that illustrate Polanski's developing skill at telling a story through images. They also reveal his preoccupation with dark subjects (not surprising, considering his early childhood experiences). The latter film pertains to voyeurism.

Break up the Dance (1957) introduces class issues when a group of punks crash an upscale party, turning it into chaos.

Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958) was Polanski's first effort to acquire international attention and continues to be a festival favorite. It relates to the cruelties of life, especially those that befall individuals who are in some way "different."

The Lamp (1959) is a surreal piece featuring dolls and a cuckoo clock.

When Angels Fall (1959) was my personal favorite, among the shorts. It relates to a haggard ancient woman who works in a men's lavatory, complete with ornate urinals. Her sentimental recollections of her youth, her ill-fated romance with a soldier, and the tragic fate of her son are intercut with her current deplorable lot.

Fat and Lean (1961) is another clever piece about class disparities. Polanski himself plays the lean and ragged servant who must cater to the whims of a rich, fat, and slobby master. In one humorous segment, the servant is tethered to a goat.

Mammals (1962) is about two men pulling a sled across a barren snowscape, each trying to come up with ways to make the other one do most of the work. The print for this film appears to be in pretty poor condition, but the basic notion of cynical selfishness comes through.

Bottom-Line: Knife in the Water is brilliantly claustrophobic and reveals many of the attributes that later became hallmarks of Polanski's film style. With the addition of eight shorts, viewers have a real opportunity to understand Polanski's early development. There's also an interesting interview with Polanski and his co-writer, Jerzy Skolimowski. Polanski was asked to direct a Hollywood remake of Knife in the Water, possibly with Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor, but had the integrity to refuse to do so, since he would be repeating himself. This film is in Polish with English subtitles and has a running time of 94 minutes. I highly recommend it.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Poland:

Ashes and Diamonds
Man of Iron
A Year in the Quiet Sun

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older