A PURE FORMALITY
A film review by Raymond Johnston
Copyright 1995 Raymond Johnston
Cowritten and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore Starring Gerard Depardieu, Roman Polanski
Polanski has been spending quite a lot of time recently in storm-isolated houses. The rains come, the phone goes dead, the power eventually goes out. A stranded wanderer gets interrogated about his life. The first time Polanski was in such a house this year was as the director of the intriguing DEATH AND THE MAIDEN. This second time he is in the house as an actor. Polanski plays Inspector Leonardo da Vinci in the film A PURE FORMALITY. Polanski is a great actor who too seldom plies that craft before the public.
Unfortunately, Guiseppe Tornatore cannot match Polanski's skill as a director. A PURE FORMALITY achieves little suspense and only manages for a few brief moments to be even interesting. The large bulk of the film takes place in a leaky border zone police station. Tornatore tries to break up the space by sticking the camera on the most unlikely places, beneath the keys of a typewriter, under the water of a toilet bowl, on the ceiling and so forth. All this achieves is underscoring that without tricks the story is of little interest.
The title is quite apt. The film is nothing more than a formal exercise in basic existentialism. Some broad clues that are clumsily thrown out to anybody who knows the least bit about mythology give away the "surprise ending." The surprise, however, is not a new one. In fact, to take a phrase from vaudeville, the gag is so old it has whiskers. 1960s TV shows like The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents managed to tell very similar stories in a half hour or hour format. At close to two hours, A PURE FORMALITY seems heavily padded.
The basic story (not giving away the 'surprise') involves a well-known novelist (Gerard Depardieu) running through the border zone without his papers. He gets arrested and taken to a station that has a sieve for a roof and little else that works any better. The novelist's name is Onoff, like on/off. Even though his picture is well known, nobody recognizes him. Then Inspector Leonardo da Vinci (Polanski) arrives and quizzes him for hours about the different characters in his novels. Why? Because the police have recently found an unidentified body. Onoff's defense is that he has amnesia. Disjointed images of his missing hours come back, one of the few successful effects in the film.
Depardieu and Polanski are fabulous together on screen. The leaden paced editing, and ham fisted direction of the film cannot destroy the magic they create when the story finally heats up to a tepid simmer. When Polanski starts scoring points in their literally depicted cat and mouse game, it even seems as if the film might be good after all.
Then the "surprise" ending comes, reminding everyone that is, as stated in the title, a purely formal rehash of some rather basic existential motifs. To see Polanski at his best as an actor, check him out in THE TENANT and CHINATOWN, both of which he also directed. He also makes appearances in ANDY WARHOL'S DRACULA, Andrej Wadja's A GENERATION.
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