Having just found Rosemary's Baby to be an excellent film, and having loved Chinatown , I decided to check out some of Polanski's earlier, non-American work. Knife in the Water is his first feature film as director, and I have to say it did not engage me half as much as the above-mentioned two did.
When I read a short plot summary, I expected something similar to Dead Calm , except much more psychological. Although he isolates the trio from the rest of the world, Polanski deliberately avoids having a psychotic hitchhiker, but it might have been more interesting if he had.
The plot as it is, two men comparing penis size for eighty-odd minutes, isn't terribly arresting. Krystyna was pushed to the side for much of the film, only really achieving a characterisation in the last fifteen minutes or so. Up until then, she had been Andrzej's wife, mostly clad in a swimsuit. This left the two men to continually try to be better than the other, but their confrontations never amounted to anything.
The main reason for this was that it never achieved the tension it promised. Maybe I was in the wrong mood, or I watched it at the wrong time of day, I don't know. Others have described this movie as nailbitingly suspenseful, but I didn't feel any of it.
Part of the problem, I felt, was that very little happened. Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby have excellent scripts in which throwaway lines come back and affect the plot. Knife didn't do that. It even broke a major rule of writing - "don't have a loaded gun unless you're prepared to fire it." The knife that the Young Man carries was never used the way it could have been. Yes, it was there to make situations which led to the Young Man and Andrzej disliking each other more, but Polanski never fired the metaphorical gun.
I agree that this was his point, but, for me, the film fails because he was trying too hard to break rules.
Something I did like was the music. A saxophone is an instrument that can be used to sound inviting and threatening at the same time. (Check out "The Sorcerer's Apprentice") But it was very sparingly used, and it didn't really fit the movie. I liked it as music, but not as a score. Perhaps it was meant to be detached, as it was intended to confuse the viewer, as eye and ear did not feel the same things.
Also good was the cinematography. Not in the sense that Polanski and Jerzy Lipman dazzled me with their skills of playing with light and shadow, but in positioning of the characters. Like George Stevens directing Shane , Polanski makes sure you notice when parts of the frame are empty, and he often has shots that show characters positioned in relation to others. Polanski gets as much as possible out of each shot in terms of what is in the frame. If he had experimented more with light and shadow, the film would be ten times better just from a technical point of view.
Polanski was still learning his craft in this film. For a first feature, it would be promising if made today, but it isn't, as Leonard Maltin describes it, "a must-see movie."
Roman Polanski's first feature-length film is a suspenseful three-person chamber drama reminiscent of the work of Ingmar Bergman. KNIFE IN THE WATER w...More at Family Video
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