Film number 46 in our Criterion box set is Roman Polanski's debut, set in Poland, of course. You can see how he got a reputation, as the film oozes style - he favors extreme closeups of faces in the foreground, with things happening in the background.
It helps that this film has precisely three people in it for all but its opening and closing stretches, when it has two. These are a couple: she seems to be in her 20s, wearing a natty pants outfit with those Far Side framed glasses, he is a tanned businessman type who seems late 30s/early 40s. They are in a car driving through rain throughout all the opening credits, and into the beginning of the film. She is driving, which is interesting, although he eventually grabs the wheel, presumably because he thinks she's about to do something wrong, and they switch. It's a natty little car, apparently luxurious for Poland, although they're definitely crammed close together. The couple seem a bit fed up with each other, and bicker, right up until a man appears in the road and refuses to budge, despite the husband's irritated honking, until the car has to swerve off the road. The figure is our third cast member, who looks in his mid-to-late 20s, although we find out later he's 19 (Communist Poland was hard on people, unsurprising given the amount the couple smokes - also the actor was 24). He has bottle blond hair and he's hitchhiking. Somehow the husband manages to enrage himself into giving the young man a lift (largely by convincing himself that the wife would have picked him up). And off they go, the young man happily babbling in the back
about how he thought this was an embassy car and the husband a chauffeur. Turns out it's very early in the morning on a Sunday (which is why he was struggling to get a lift) and the couple are on their way to a huge lake where they have a sailboat moored. This is pretty much unimaginable luxury as far as the young man is concerned (and I have to keep calling him "the young man" because of the three only Krystyna is named, and that because the boat is called Christine and blondie asks if it's named after her). Talking of Krystyna, for most of the time she's on the boat (by far the bulk of the movie) she's not wearing her Far Side glasses and she looks quite different. In fact it was driving me crazy who she reminded me of (facially) and it's just come to me: Greta Thunberg. It's the eyes.
Anyway, the young man initially has no intention of joining them on the boat, but once again, the husband seems to convince himself into inviting him along. He dismisses him and calls him back several times, but by the last one the young man says he knew he was going to. Sidenote: I've been looking at stills from this film for years, because the box set comes with a huge coffee-table book with a spread on each film in it, and they gave me the impression that this was a sort of Brimstone and Treacle/Satlburn situation, where a mysterious manipulative young man comes into a family and destroys it intentionally, but this kid really just seems like kind of a doofus.
However, he does have a really big knife (yes, it is the titular one - you thought that was a metaphor, didn't you?) that plays a significant role in the proceedings.
If, like me, you came to this film expecting some kind of thriller, you'll be disappointed. [MAJOR SPOILER] all three of the protagonists are alive at the end. And in fact, for significant stretches of the film, they get on just fine. They play silly kids games (pick up sticks)
when it's raining outside (the film takes place over almost exactly 24 hours). There are definitely tense moments, and exciting moments (they run aground, for example, just as the storm starts), but there's also a lot of quotidian moments, including dragging the boat through rushes, for some reason.
As with all Roman Polanski films that I've seen, however, there is a sort of creeping dread. Something about the young kid clearly rankles the older man, and he keeps needling him. In return, the young man shows that he can shin up the mask like a monkey and play that game with the knife and the fingers. Then it builds until suddenly the older man takes things too far, and for a while there are no longer three people on the screen.
But by the end, the older man sort of redeems himself, whereas the wife has done something he will find hard to forgive (in fact, he doesn't believe her when she tells him, and she acquiesces when he tells her to stop joking).
Is it a great film? Well, it's probably a great first film, and it must have been a bugger to shoot, as they're all really out on the real (not especially large) sailboat on a real Polish lake, and they didn't have the small cameras they have now. And it keeps you on your toes with a grand total of three actors and one setting (and normally I hate "box" episodes of TV shows where they do that to save money - "Fly" in Breaking Bad, for example). But the score is pretty cheesy (it sounds exactly what you'd expect Jazz in Communist Poland to sound like). And, as usual, I'm not sure what we're supposed to take away from it. Men are basically children? Men and women are fundamentally different? No doubt there's some stuff about class in there, although Krystyna tells the young man that her husband and her started off just like him, and without inherited wealth behind the Iron Curtain you can assume she's not kidding. So it's both an interesting period piece and something that seems to shoot for universal truths. Anyway, I thought the husband's self-designed pot holder was great, no matter how the kid laughed at it. And watch for the wiper bookends.
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