The Greatest Films: Knife in the Water

Watching Roman Polanski’s first feature films is quite the anxious experience.  There are tense moments in this film that would be filler in others.  Polanski interestingly weaves a psychological thriller out of thin air, and does so without the high intrigue and involved plot that plague other films of similar tone.  The hardest thing to discern from Knife in the Water is its societal and historical message that is carried by its pointed stylistic intention and sparsely populated screenplay.  There has never been a quieter, heart-pounding thriller since this quirky Polish film.

Looking throughout the frames of this film, it is tough to distinguish what type of society this characters seem to exist within.  Beyond the principle three players, there doesn’t seem to be a hint of life within the setting of Polanski’s film.  The occurrences between the hitchhiker and the couple seem to happen completely independently from the outside world.  While this is attributed to a budgetary concession on Polanski’s behalf, it also might be seen as a subversive, violent reaction to the increasingly juicier plots of 1960’s thrillers, which tended to rely on scenarios dealing with espionage and political happenings.  Limiting the number of characters to just three gave way to increased focus on the trio’s development, not only personally but as a group dynamic.  The only glimpses of a possible society is seen within the life stories of the three characters, as the couple carries an air of smug superiority with them, even through their political affiliation with the Communists.  On the other hand, the handsome drifter seems to see himself as a member of the lower-class worker’s class, or as someone who relies very little on physical possessions.  While the lack of an outside society impeding on the group, Polanski manipulates these three people into telling a story of typical Polish class struggles.  While one side seems to have it all in terms of possessions and social status, the other has inherited the can-do free spirit of a more upbeat Poland.  One is a disconnected well-off individual, while the other is a worldly scholar of the essential.  The societal implications within the film are not so great that they overwhelm the overall output, but punctuate the edgy, well-pictured paramount scenes within the film.

The cinematography in Knife in the Water is one for the ages – a tour-de-force of maverick, no-regrets filmmaking.  The film is reminiscent of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor as it mixes claustrophobic close-ups with crowded long shots in scenes of increasing tension.  The incidents on the sailboat are among the best filmed sequences within the entire film, as the camera seems to take priority in judging the gradually more ridiculous spectacle of the two men vying for alpha male status.  In one particular exchange, the hitchhiker shimmies up the mast of the ship, which had been similarly used earlier to give a bird’s eye view of the tiny characters on board.  While the knife scene or Krystyna’s reveal might be the ones that make or break the dueling men, it is this batted around scene of climbing that asserts the hitchhiker’s dominance.  Not only does the next several shots show the belittled husband but also puts him in a subservient role within the framing of the picture.

The film does not strive to be anymore than a hushed voice for a particular social reality within Poland during the 1960’s, and it also does not go all-out to be the explosive Hollywood thriller that it was originally slated to be.  The truth is that Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water is an epic accomplishment of a silenced stature.  Through just simple camera movements and setups, the director achieves a level of filmmaking not often reached.  There is an idea of cinema as truth, and it does not come in the form of the big Hollywood spectacle or the million dollar script, but in the muted exchanges between two characters in a sparse environment.