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Rosemary’s Baby
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Shortly after the release of Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski breezily commented: “Characters and
utmost fear are the most important thing in cinema”. He modestly added that his
own work was “real cinema, done for cinema … well in advance of anything that
has been done in the semantics of cinema”.
Polanski was a confident, rising star in those days. He
was considered an iconoclast and a modernist in the tradition of Luis Buñuel. Today, when we watch his best films
from the vantage point of the 21st century (setting aside the personal
controversy angle), we are likely to value him for a more forgotten,
old-fashioned quality: his superb craftsmanship as a storyteller and stylist.
Rosemary's Baby, cleverly adapted (by Polanski
himself) from Ira Levin’s best-seller, is a tale of Satanism and female
paranoia set in a deceptively serene Old World apartment in New York. Rosemary
(Mia Farrow) speaks with the high-pitched voice of a child and waddles around like
a thin, furry, uncoordinated duckling. Her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), is a
self-absorbed actor whose mood gradually changes from scatty to menacing.
“Ro” has good reason to feel menaced. The dotty old
couple in the next apartment, the Castevets (Ruth
Gordon and Sidney Blackmer), seem to regularly lead a bunch of their cronies in
spooky, mystical chants. Friends and acquaintances of the young newly-weds are
found dead in mysterious circumstances. And once Rosemary falls pregnant, she
is besieged by shocking nightmares, and then subtly coerced into a health
program that makes her look abnormally sick.
Polanski's command of detail, on all levels, is
incomparable. Everything is unsettling in an odd, uncanny way: the unnaturally
bright colours of Rosemary's apartment, the slightly
constrictive or distant camera angles, the vocal patter of everyday banalities
— not to mention the fairytale-like score of his favourite composer, Krzysztof Komeda (1931-1969). Polanski's often unusual casting
decisions, and his feeling for a modern comedy of urban manners, are constantly
satisfying – Gordon, Cassavetes and a cameo from Charles Grodin are especially, darkly pleasurable.
Rosemary's Baby has stood the test of time.
Some less impressed critics of the period, including Polanski’s early structuralist
exegete Pascal Kané [1946-2020] at Cahiers du cinéma,
found the ambiguous probing of paranoia and sexual malaise – explored so
intensely in Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-Sac (1966) – mainly to be a matter of clever patterning at the surface level of
plot intrigue. Its fascination (so this argument goes) functions on a
formalistic plane detached from the workings of character and theme. Others
claim that, in its narrative-adaptation craft, it tends to drag in its middle
section, beating time as it builds up to the genuinely disquieting finale.
It’s hard, today, to credit these gripes with much insight.
However you slice it, Rosemary’s Baby is a terrific exercise from one of cinema's most astute artists. It marked Polanksi’s triumphant gear-change from modernist, European
modes to crafty, American-style storytelling, and it clinched his status as the
internationalist filmmaker par excellence.
In the horror genre, it stands between Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) – Polanski
regularly rejected in interviews any Hitchcockian influence – and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), as an ingenious, perfectly formed spin on Gothic nightmares of
sexuality and family.
Postscript: In late
2016, Cristina Álvarez López and I were commissioned by curator Roberta Ciabarra of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image – today
officially known only as ACMI – to make an audiovisual essay accompanying a
select Polanski retrospective; just a year later, this program of events might
have had a tough time getting the institutional green light. Our
16-and-a-half-minute Roman Polanski: A Cinema of Invasion can be viewed here.
MORE Polanski: Chinatown, Death and the Maiden, The Fat and the Lean, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Frantic, The Ninth Gate, The Pianist, The Tenant, Tess, Two Men and a Wardrobe, Knife in the Water © Adrian Martin December 1997 / April 2001 |
