DEATH AND THE MAIDEN
A film review by Raymond Johnston
Copyright 1994 Raymond Johnston
Directed by Roman Polanski Starring- Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley, and Stuart Wilson Based on the play by Ariel Dorfman
The title immediately alerts one that they are possibly in for a heavy handed modern allegorical polemic, with an actor standing each for each of the title characters. Actually there are three characters. The characters are a victim, a judge, and an accused fascist; all stranded in an isolated cabin. The setting is an Unnamed South American Country. The subject at hand is the aftermath of totalitarianism. It sounds like Sartre's "No Exit" or Jean Genet's "The Balcony," existential dramas that were brilliant nearly half a century ago, but old hat to anybody who has read a book recently.
And it probably would be except for the fact that it is directed by Roman Polanski. All of Polanski's best films deal with a small group of characters trapped together, with one character trapped even further, trapped in their own mind. KNIFE IN THE WATER and BITTER MOON trap the people on boats; REPULSION, THE TENANT and ROSEMARY'S BABY trap people in their urban apartments. CUL DE SAC, and his new film DEATH AND THE MAIDEN, trap people in the false complacency of suburban life.
Nobody but Polanski could create so much tension in the throw away opening scene. Sigourney Weaver is preparing dinner, but in a tank top and boxer shorts. The audience is put in an uncomfortable voyeuristic position, wanting to leave and wanting to watch. We have collectively intruded on a private moment, and continue intruding. Something subtle about the camera movement makes this different from other opening scenes. Her unawareness of our watching makes it almost as if we were stalking her in her own home. Just as this gets to be a little creepy, the radio announces that hearings by the new government will look into the death squad killings of a previous regime. Sigourney Weaver listens with particular interest, and a storm knocks out the electricity and the phone.
Here is where the casting is truly perfect. One might expect the actress in the darkened isolated house to succumb to any number of weak female cliches, but all the audience knows that Sigourney Weaver, in similar attire, single handedly defeated the Alien on several occasions. Whatever the deposed dictatorship can put up against her is going to be in for quite a fight.
What turns up in the middle of the storm is Ben Kingsley, best known as Ghandi. In our minds a saintly man, Kingsley denies that he was in the country at all during the death-squad era. Torture victim Weaver has a different opinion. Subconsciously one still roots for their previous characters. We hope Weaver destroys the Alien, and Kingsley rises above repression. One of the most claustrophobic and tense ninety minutes of cinema follows. Nobody but Polanski could use the simple tricks that create the emotional roller-coaster ride and have it not seem corny. The storm knocking out the power routine was old when movies first learned to talk. The film is so riveting that one forgets how much of a cliche it is.
The dimly lit naturalistic set and particularly grainy film lend a home-movie reality to the story. It is a sense of reality that works well. The horror film cliche set-up gives way to the horror of Twentieth Century life: tortures and disappearances, followed by cover-ups and silence.
The play is full of purple prose, and the inevitable 'what makes us different from them?' speeches. Polanski races past all of that quickly. Much more time is spent on dribbling out the details of what supposedly happened fifteen years ago, and what Weaver intends to do about it now. As Weaver reveals details of her torture, we are again put in the uncomfortable position of eavesdropper. Our listening intrudes on her innermost privacy, and forces us to identify, uneasily, with Kingsley, the accused arch-intruder of her life.
While much attention paid to details throughout the tense dimly lit cabin scenes, the few studio made exterior scenes are very crude. Less than sophisticated matte shots unconvincingly place the characters outside the cabin. While perhaps unintentional, it does frame these more pointed scenes as staged existentialism, separate from the drama of the cabin. Even the scenes on the porch, with the forced-perspective prop lighthouse blinking in the "distance," seem distinctly removed from the real life horror of the interior situation. The subtle staginess diffuses the awkward unnaturalness of some of the Ariel Dorfman's more political dialogue.
A couple of years Polanski turned down Speilberg's invitation to direct SCHINDLER'S LIST. He felt the subject matter, which intersected with his own life, was too personal for him to direct. This film deals with the same fascist themes on a microcosmic scale. DEATH AND THE MAIDEN is the work of a world class film maker at the peak of his form. With two top notch films in one year, at least according to the US distribution dates, this marks a major comeback.
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