Knife In the Water

Knife in Water is Roman Polanski's directorial debut. Aesthetically sparse, slowly paced, and beautifully shot, it is a definitively pensive film centered around (aggrivatingly) slow-building tensions and desires.

There are only three characters (you only know two of their names) on a boat, and a bleak, seemingly endless lake provides much of the film’s scenery. Polanski advances the plot through excruciatingly tense episodes, whose conflicts remain without fruition until the film’s very last moments. The result is a biting and cinematographically unique study of sexual tension and competitive masculinity. From an analytical perspective, this makes for much dense, cerebral meat to chew on, but as a movie watcher, things can get kind of slow and aimless.

The film begins when a married couple, on their way to a lake, nearly hit a young man who is hitchhiking, and decide to pick him up. He joins the couple on their sailboat where he is continually taunted by the husband, Andrjez, for his lack of sailing prowess. These early scenes immediately establish a rivalry between the student and Andrjez, who are both competing to ‘out-man’ one another, and impress Khrystyna, Andrjez’s wife. This conflict is reinforced by intense, close-up, point-of-view shots that place the camera over a shoulder, or directly on a single face. These shots keep the film claustrophobic and contained in a way that heightens the tension. Adding to the feeling of entrapment is the simple fact that the entire movie takes place on a tiny sail boat, where the characters have no where to excuse themselves when emotions run high.

These scenes also heighten their tension through silence. The dialogue is unbelievably sparse, and when the characters do speak, it is usually about something banal like the weather or orientation of the boat. Through this silence, the viewer becomes very aware of all of the things that are NOT being said- one assumes the characters are silent not because they don’t have anything to say, but because they are scared to find out what will happen if they do say what’s running through their minds.

All this makes for a brittle, beautiful, but ultimately, hard to love little film.