DEATH AND THE MAIDEN
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1995 Ben Hoffman
There are three main characters in this extraordinary film that is based on the play by Ariel Dorfman. Far more important than the story that unfolds is a universal theme that the film explores so very well.
Unlike most films where bits and pieces that take place in one location are shot and later spliced to make the movie flow, Roman Polanski opted to film DEATH AND THE MAIDEN chronologically. Taking advantage of the fact that most of the movie takes place in one room, Polanski shot the film as the story would have really unfolded.
"Somewhere" in Latin America, at a lonely beach house, the gripping adventure begins on a stormy, dark night. Paulina Escobar (Sigorney Weaver), is at home when her husband, Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) is dropped off at their home. With them is a stranger, a Dr. Roberto Miranda, who has given her husband a lift when Gerardo's car broke down. He is invited into their home, thanked and given a drink to help him warm himself and dry up.
This unspecified Latin American country, long a dictatorship, had just recently been overthrown. Paulina's husband, an attorney, has been appointed to head a commission to find those who had worked on death squads for the dictatorship, and now to bring them to justice. As Dr. Miranda is exchanging small talk with the host and hostess, Paulina suddenly becomes aware that the doctor is the one who 15 years ago had raped her in jail, had applied live electrodes to various sensitive parts of her body as well as to other women prisoners.
Paulina gets Gerardo aside and tells him who Dr. Miranda is. He tells her it happened fifteen years ago and she cannot be sure. As the one appointed by the new government to find the culprits, he certainly does now want to engage in the same flimsy tactics the old regime used to inflict on their prisoners.
The cast is superb. Wilson as the very reasonable lawyer-husband who tries to reason but not help his wife without absolute proof; Ben Kingsley as the apparently shocked and bewildered man now bound hand and foot to a chair, is helpless. He says that at the time of the incidents described by Paulina, he was in Scotland studying at a university and nowhere near Latin America. Paulina, for her part, is ready to shoot him. She recognizes his features full well. She remembers the taste of the skin on his neck when she tried to bite him off ... but she cannot at this point convince her husband to help her.
The film is a nail-biter. The ending is even better. You will not want to miss this one. Polanski has proven once again, if proof were needed, that he can make a movie with the best of them.
4 bytes 4 Bytes = Absolutely must see. 3 Bytes = Too good to be missed. 2 Bytes = So so. 1 Byte = Save your money.
Ben Hoffman
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