Poland, 1962
Directed by Roman Polanski
With Zygmnunt Malanowicz (the young man), Leon Niemczyk (Andrzej), Jolanta Umecka (Krystyna)
The plot of “Nóz w wodize – A Knife in the Water” is quite simple to sum up. A couple driving through the Polish countryside meets a hitchhiker; they invite the young man to spend the rest of the day with them; but then the three struggle to get along and a strange tension builds up all along the day; finally, at the end of the night, things get out of control.
Such a narrative provides many possibilities as far as sexual desire and criminal impulse are concerned. The tension racking the nerves of Andrzej, Krystyna, and the young man, who remains deliberately unnamed throughout the film, looks decidedly like a predictable outcome, with death beckoning. Yet the twists and turns, along with the characters’ attitudes, are rather befuddling as the plot proceeds and the film feels at times rather aimless in its course.
But the most astonishing character of this debut feature is the stage where the drama unfolds: a small sail boat used for cruising the lakes and rivers of the country, the sleek luxury toy of Andrzej, who writers in a sport newspaper, and a stunning display of personal wealth in a socialist economy, as much as his car is, as the young man readily notes. To examine the awkward relationships of a trio, and to create tension, director Roman Polanski has not really chosen the easiest set to manage and to shoot, to say the least. The film is clearly shot on location, and the hard work that such an endeavor implies must have been truly daunting.
The visual result is impressive, in part thanks to a remarkably crisp cinematography, with a clear depth of focus and sharp contrasts and contours. The camera roves precisely and vividly around the characters as either they pace on the boat, or sit and lay in a less and less relaxed manner, while coping with the constant swaying of the sails and moving of the boat on the changing surface of water under a hot, pleasant sun. Here are highly dynamic, absolutely realistic, really engrossing pictures, which help shape the tension, and unmistakably point to striking visual talent and competence.
The trouble of the young man comes from the fact he did not really intended to tag along the couple on the water; actually, he never boarded such a boat; moreover, he does not know, so he claims, how to swim. But beyond those understandable facts, there is a more complex, cryptic problem: if it is not entirely clear why he accepted Andrzej’s invitation – perhaps out of curiosity, or for the fun of it, or even to challenge a man who has only reluctantly and rudely taken him in his wonderful white car – the motivation of the writer is even harder to grasp. The fact is, partly owing to the petulant and gauche ways of the young man, Andrzej enjoys teasing him, and insists on slamming his attitudes and habits, even though he is pleased to wow him and to watch him having fun. Krystyna seems satisfied to keep a low profile, and to be a servant to her husband who emphasizes a boat needs a captain who provides direction and discipline. But she increasingly voices sympathy for the young man, her sarcasms soon mix with the harsh words the men exchange, the older keen on running his boat, his crew, and his free time as it suits him, while the younger keeps his whimsical and obstreperous approach to the situation whatever way it evolves.
Things blow up at the end of the night, when the image used as the title becomes a reality. A quarrel between the two men ends up with the heavy, dangerous jack knife of the hitchhiker thrown in the water; both men also fall overboard, and the fear that death has come to hit them creeps: first the couple think the young man has drowned, but then it is Andrzej, who has dived to find the supposed dead body, who seems to vanish in the depth of the river. While he is missing, the young man climbs back on the boat, and has a strange conversation with Krystyna, who ends up in a shocking moment of lust.
The sexual impulse the barely clothed bodies, the sun, the small space of the boat, the fun, suggested has taken over the characters. The danger the boy stood for has been highlighting by striking shot compositions clearly using him on the foreground to block partially the view on the rest of the picture featuring the couple – and there is the erotic symbol of the knife he always wields and plays with. But if Andrzej may have felt threatened, it is not clear what Krystyna wanted, expected, or just instinctively felt. The sharp, blunt talk she has with the young man who has resuscitated from his hypothetical drowning still suggests she would keep a distance, only to throw it away and pounce on her prey. And it is hard what the young man, even as he lets desire control him, has ever reckoned to do with the woman, though he has often looked at her with attention. The relations of the three is filled with incidents and moments of sympathy or bitter tiffs, but this scattershot narrative does not really follow a clear, obvious, arc that would have cast the final sex party as a foregone conclusion – and actually, the film ends in quite other ways, with the coming back of Andrzej.
The narrative is bookended with other amazing pictures, focused on the couple’s car, shot first from the outside as it rides the road and then from the inside at the beginning and at end in the opposite order (from the inside, then from the outside, in a long shot with a spectacular perspective; if the shooting is amazing, the editing of the pictures is even more admirable). And actually it is in those scenes that the story is more clearly articulated. The meeting with the stranger is the couple’s pathetic attempt to entertain themselves and to show off but also an unexpected litmus test that brutally exposes their fault lines. They did not come across as really happy in the first images, which showed them mute and nervous. At the end, they are even more at odds, though it seems that Krystyna has the upper hand on Andrzej. Their weird and then tragic Sunday illustrates how dysfunctional their marriage is, how deeply she resents his personality, and how overweening and possessive he is. The underlying story deals with a hopeless failure of love – wealth and habit just papering over the cracks.
The young man who has disturbed the fake harmony of a Sunday has disappeared from their lives and from the film readily – he would never be seen onscreen, while Andrzej still thinks he is dead, which in fact means to him right now that his wife could not have dared to sleep with him, as she mischievously insists. But the wounds he has opened, or perhaps reopened, could be hard to heal – as the car is still pulled up at a crossroad, this great Roman Polanski film does imply that a solution could never come, and the couple could never patch up.