A young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) throws a kink in a couple’s sailing plans in Roman Polanski’s KNIFE IN THE WATER
KNIFE IN THE WATER (NÓŻ W WODZIE) (Roman Polanski, 1962)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Thursday, June 19, 4:05
Series runs June 13-19
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
“Even discounting wind, weather, and the natural hazards of filming afloat, Knife in the Water was a devilishly difficult picture to make,” Roman Polanski wrote in his 1984 autobiography, Roman by Polanski. That is likely to have been a blessing in disguise, upping the ante in the Polish filmmaker’s debut feature film, a tense three-character thriller set primarily on a sailboat, filmed on location. Upper-middle-class couple Andrzej (theater veteran Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (nonprofessional actor Jolanta Umecka) are on their way to their sailboat at the marina when a young hitchhiker (drama school grad Zygmunt Malanowicz) forces them to pull over on an otherwise empty road. Andrzej and the unnamed man almost immediately get involved in a physical and psychological pissing contest, with Andrzej soon inviting him to join them on their sojourn, practically daring the hitchhiker to make a move on his wife. Once on the boat, the two men continue their battle of wills, which becomes more dangerous once the young man reveals his rather threatening knife, which he handles like a pro. Lodz Film School graduate Polanski, who collaborated on the final screenplay with Jerzy Skolimowski (The Shout, Moonlighting) after initially working with Jakub Goldberg, envelops the black-and-white Knife in the Water in a highly volatile, claustrophobic energy, creating gorgeous scenes intimately photographed by cinematographer Jerzy Lipman, from Andrzej and Krystyna in their small car to all three trying to find space on the boat amid the vast sea and a changing wind. Many of the shots are highlighted by deep focus in which one character is shown in close-up in the foreground with the others in the background, alerting the viewer to various potential conflicts — sexual, economic, class- and gender-based — all underscored by Krzysztof T. Komeda’s intoxicating jazz score featuring saxophonist Bernt Rosengren.
Things got kind of crowded while making KNIFE IN THE WATER
The first Polish film to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and winner of the Critics’ FIPRESCI Prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, Knife in the Water is being shown in a high-definition digital projection on June 19 at 4:05 as part of the IFC Center series “The Fearless Roman Polanski,” which also includes such diverse films by the immensely talented, controversial director as Chinatown, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Frantic, The Ghost Writer, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, and the rarely screened Weekend of a Champion, leading up to the June 20 theatrical release of his latest masterwork, Venus in Fur.
Journalist and documentarian Frauke Finsterwalder’s twisted and dark feature-length fiction debut, Finsterworld, paints a rather unflattering portrait of a modern-day Germany still haunted by World War II. Written by Finsterwalder (Die große Pyramide, Weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist) and her author husband, Christian Kracht, the black comedy follows a dozen interrelated characters, each with his or her own personal hang-ups and fetishes, as they go through one very wild and crazy day. Claude Petersdorf (Michael Maertens) is a pedicurist who has an unnatural desire for the feet of Frau Sandberg (Margit Carstensen), a wheelchair-bound resident of an old age home. Her son, Georg Sandberg (Bernhard Schütz), and his wife, Inga (Corinna Harfouch), are a wealthy, self-obsessed couple who are embarrassed to be Germans. Their son, Maximilian (Jakub Gierszał), is a spoiled brat who, with his best friend, Jonas (Max Pellny), bullies quirky-nerdy fellow students Natalie (Carla Juri) and Dominik (Leonard Scheicher) during a class trip to a concentration camp led by teacher Lehrer Nickel (Christoph Bach), who thinks the kids can actually learn something from the sins of the past. Tom (Ronald Zehrfeld) is a cop who likes to put on a different kind of uniform at times — he’s a closet Furry. Tom’s girlfriend, Franziska Feldenhoven (Sandra Hüller), is a frustrated documentary filmmaker stuck with a boring subject. And Einsiedler (Johannes Krisch) is a hermit who captures and cares for a forest raven. Various odd actions intersect, bringing the diverse cast of characters together in strange, ultimately dangerous ways as they all keep picking at their scabs, both physical and psychological.
Canadian-born director James Cameron (The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and some movie about a big sinking ship) crafts an expensive, high-tech apology to native people the world over in the futuristic adventure thriller Avatar. Borrowing elements from such films as The Matrix, Alien, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Star Wars saga, Disney’s animated Pocohantas, Reign of Fire, and many a cowboy-and-Indian tale, Cameron propels audiences into 2154, where a team of scientists join up with military troops on Pandora, home to the invaluable mineral unobtainium as well as a native race known alternately as the na’vi, or the People. In the middle of it all is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a wheelchair-bound former Marine who takes the place of his brilliant brother, who was recently murdered. While head researcher Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) thinks bringing Jake on board is a mistake, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) sees it as an opportunity to make use of Jake’s expert reconnaissance skills, so Jake takes over what would have been his brother’s avatar — a giant creation modeled after the na’vi that humans can operate from a pod while asleep and that gives Jake the opportunity to walk again through this tall blue being. Quaritch secretly promises Jake that he will get him the costly procedure that will give him back the use of his real legs if he infiltrates the na’vi and sends intel back to the colonel as the military prepares an all-out assault on the People, but when Jake falls for the beautiful Neytiri (Zoë Saldaña), he undergoes a change of heart. As with most Cameron films, the visual splendor is thwarted by a tired, clichéd script that devolves into complete silliness in the last half hour, spurred on by James Horner’s treacly score and plenty of poorly delivered lines. But Avatar is still lots of stupid fun, especially if you see it in 3D, which is how it’s being shown June 15 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the “See It Big! Science Fiction (Part Two)” series, which continues through July 12 with such other sci-fi flicks as Cameron’s The Abyss and The Terminator, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. 
