BITTER MOON
A film review by Jon A. Webb
Copyright 1994 Jon A. Webb
I couldn't tell if BITTER MOON was intended as a serious study of sexual obsession or as a too-subtle parody of the same thing. Roman Polanski has either gone off the deep end with this story of a man overwhelmed by desire for his young wife (played by Emmanuel Seigner, who happens to be Polanski's young wife) or I and the audience I was with are simply too unsophisticated to appreciate this wry, witty story of the sexual exploits of a pompous fool.
Peter Coyote plays a wrecked man who claims to have been destroyed by his intensely sexual relationship with his wife. On a cruise to Israel, Hugh Grant meets first his wife, and later him, and is warned against her charms. (Oddly, Grant's wife in this film is Kristin Scott-Thomas, his friend from FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL, who again plays a woman named Fiona.)
The strangest thing about this film is that Coyote's character writes and talks with consistently lurid, purple prose. He comes to Paris to be a writer, though it's obvious he can't write at all, as his style is straight out of the pages of a romance novel combined with Penthouse letters.
I have a suspicion that Polanski intended Coyote's character to have a comic effect, at which he is certainly successful, but then somehow in the editing the point of the film, which was to make a comedy, got strangely twisted by someone with no sense of humor. The overall tone of the film is entirely serious, if excessively cliche, and the direciton never makes it clear how you are supposed to react.
If this is a serious film, it has been done better before, for example in the execrable WILD ORCHID or the mediocre 9-1/2 WEEKS. I never before realized how good these movies could look in comparison. Compared to Coyote as directed by Polanski, Mickey Rourke is Marlon Brando before he gained weight.
I have a suggestion for improving the film, if Polanski wants to try again. Try casting Grant as the wrecked lover and Coyote as the naif. The effect would be entirely different, and much more intersting, if it were Grant saying those lines--assuming he could keep his expression straight, that is.
One other thing: Polanski would be well-advised to keep young children out of his films. One cannot help but wonder what the casting requirements must be.
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