Roman Polanski | Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water) / 1962

a game of sexual chance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jakub Goldberg, Roman Polanski, and Jerzy Skolimowski (screenplay), Roman Polanski (director) Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water) / 1962

 

Tension is perhaps the operative word in describing Roman Polanski's 1962 amazing debut film, Knife in the Water. From the first scene in the film, where Andrzej and Krystyna are driving down an unpaved lane on their way to a boating trip, to the last image of the car at a crossroad, Andrzej is undecided upon which direction to take, while the movie permeates a sense of dread—sexual anxiety and fear of death.  

     In that first scene, with Krystyna at the wheel of their car, Andrzej criticizes her driving; she stops the car as they silently exchange positions. We know already, accordingly, that this married couple is inured to each other's assaults, and we recognize that their relationship will be a subject of the narrative.

     Soon after, the couple encounters a young boy (the only name he is given in the credits) standing in the middle of the road, refusing to budge in his attempt to catch a ride. In anger for the boy's position, Andrzej swears and drives unnecessarily close the hitchhiker before stopping the car. In a pattern that will be repeated throughout the film, he chastises and dismisses the young man before taking him into the back seat, a situation, obviously, similar to the abusive relationship between him and his wife.

   They arrive at the harbor that holds their small skiff, seemingly happy to rid themselves of their unwanted guest. But when the young boy begins to leave them, Andrzej calls him back, inviting him to join their overnight excursion. The young man demurs: he is a hiker, a man of the woods (he later declares he cannot swim). But the older man challenges him further, and the dare is taken up. We know now that the film will center upon the tension between the two, upon Andrzej's attempts to outperform the younger man, the young boy's fearless actions wrapped up in his youthful good looks.

     Of course, Andrzej has taken in the younger man precisely to prove that, despite his age, he is still a virile being, worthy of his younger, attractive wife. And a great deal of the movie is taken up in the intense detail of the couple's actions as they take the boat out of harbor, prepare lunch and dinner, raise the sails, and lower them, etc. They are a team, like a well-oiled machine, who work perfectly together. And their actions are clearly meant to educate (for Andrzej at least) the young innocent in their midst.

     However, what doesn't get discussed in the reviews and essays I have read, is that not only is Andrzej attempting to prove his marital rights, but that he is also sexually attracted to the young boy, and many of the dares they toss to one another are homoerotic flirtations. The fixation of the young man upon his hunting knife and his skill in using it is clearly a symbol of male virility (and all sexual implications that emanate from that). There is something almost pathetic about Andrzej's attempt to imitate the young man's game of quickly maneuvering the knife between his fingers in stabs against the wooden floor of the boat. Compared to the young man, he is slow and awkward. When the boy easily scampers up to the top of the mainsail it is as if he were putting on display, like some sort wild beast, his lithe, muscled body, he proves Andrzej a kind of older man, an elderly wimp.

     Andrzej, on the other hand, perfectly at home in the boat, relishes the discomfort of the younger being who encounters a voyage that seems anything but a pleasurable day trip. Throughout the movie, the trio is forced to pull the boat—almost like a scene out of The African Queen—through swampy rush-covered spots, float it in a frozen barren of windless space, and rudder the craft through storm-laden skies. When, in a sudden squall, they pull the boat into a small haven for the night, retreating to the cramped quarters below deck, we are certain that the psychological battles in which the males have been engaged will spill over into literal violence. A pesky mosquito attacking the young man's face reinforces that sensation.

     But Polanski takes the sexual attractions of the trio even further as they play a game of pick-up sticks in which the loser of each round must surrender an item upon his body. Andrzej, a master of this entertainment, loses nothing, while Krystyna loses a shoe, and the young boy temporarily loses his shirt and his beloved knife.

     At sunrise, as the young man and Krystyna sit upon the deck, the predicted violence erupts, Andrzej having pocketed the young man's knife and desperate to reclaim his sexual virility, reveals that he has the taken the weapon, daring the young man to come forward and "get" it. When the handsome boy, himself a vision of the knife on the water, attempts to do so, the knife falls into the lake, Andrzej pushing the young man unto a rig that juts over the water, as the boy follows the path of his treasured "tool."

     Before they can even take stock, they have lost sight of the man, Krystyna declaring that Andrzej has killed him! Both Krystna and Andrzej attempt to discover his body but are unable to do so: the young man, hangs on a nearby buoy, diving beneath it as they search all sides of the object.

     It is Krystyna now who expresses her anger and frustration. Both men are boys, she declares, playing some absurd game for her affections. Disgusted—and fearful—for the consequences of their sport she vents her rage against her husband. Furiously, Andrzej swims away, also disappearing, and she is left alone, the only stable being, and the only one able to soberly return their boat to port.

     The young man, who evidently can swim, if somewhat awkwardly, returns to the boat, as Krystyna now berates him for his own version of swagger, clearly emanating from his bitterness of his poverty-stricken youth, and challenging what, for him, appears as a class difference (few Polish people in those days owned cars, let alone boats; Andrzej is a university professor). Krystyna, however, sets him straight: that, in truth, he is no different from them, that they have had to endure the same difficulties, privations which she straight-forwardly lists. In short, the young man is himself is a future Andrzej. The skiff that has circled in its movements throughout the day has been a journey for Andrzej into the past, for the boy into the hidden world that lies ahead.

     At the moment, however, the young man (played by Zygmunt Malanowicz, who later appeared in over 30 films) is so stunningly beautiful that her attraction to him is nearly uncontrollable. The two release that tension through sex.

     Entering to harbor, the boy escaping to shore before she docks, Krystyna greets Andrzej. Immediately they return to their patterned ways of life as they close up the boat and return to their car, he insisting that he will go to the police. When she finally admits that the boy swam back to the boat, he refuses to believe her, suggesting that it is she who is terrified of facing the truth. Denying this, she admits that she has had sex with the boy. Andrzej rejects her statements as a cover. Yet as their car reaches the fork in the road where they will turn either to the police station or home, Andrzej stops the automobile, clearly unable to make a decision. The camera pans away from them, their car remaining in place as the screen blackens. Either he must face his own criminal behavior or the new future with which she has presented him.

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2009).

  

Guy Maddin | Sissy Boy Slap Party / 1994 (lost), remade 2004

sailors’ delight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Guy Maddin (screenwriter and director) Sissy Boy Slap Party / 1994 (lost), remade 2004

 

Given Canadian director Guy Maddin’s eccentric oeuvre with its commitment to eerie and near-perverted relationships between children and parents, and its overall approximation of silent film epics, it should come as no surprise that hidden among his many gems is the wonderful gay bacchanal, Sissy Boy Slap Party, filmed in 1994 but lost and remade in what is described as The Director’s Cut—as if somehow its precious six minutes had previously been cut and censored—in 2004.      

    This wonderful work can almost be seen as a celebratory salute to Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. But whereas the 1963 film was an almost languid portrayal of a multi-sexual orgy harkening back to works such as Cecille DeMille’s Hollywood tribute to the naughty Nero, Maddin goes full forward with a symbolic depiction of a totally gay orgy among sailors, black boys, and native Americans all stranded, inexplicably, on an island headed by a kind of Pasha (Louis Negrin) whose brief departure lets all hell break loose.

      Before exiting, however, he scolds his indolent minions for getting too fat, petulantly declaring, a bit like Divine in John Waters’ Female Trouble: “I gotta go to the shop and buy some condoms. And remember: NO SLAPPING."

      We may not quite comprehend what his edict about “slapping” is all about—it was actually based on a game one of the actors Caelum Vatnsdal frequently played with his friends, whose rules required them to attempt to slap each other while keeping their elbows locked to their sides to limit their range of motion—unless we happen to recall all those spanking movies popular as both heterosexual and LGBTQ porno shorts for almost a century.

        Like bad boys always do, one of the previously lazy sailor boys slaps an older man across the face the moment the Pasha is out of sight. That act, in turn, quickly leads others to engage in similar behavior, which leads to the entire populace putting their hands across cheeks, ears, and noses, actions which grow and crescendo again and again as the half-naked natives grow wildly restless to the beat of the tom-toms and tympani.

        Before our very eyes, the facial slaps quickly shift to chests, backs, and finally bottoms, as pants are pulled down and butts beaten what we know would be red if the film were not in black-and-white.

        Finally, as the action, in its second wave, transforms the camera lens itself into a kind of spinning top refracting the mad orgy of open palms put upon bodies so endlessly until we might almost describe all the participants as becoming so “slap happy” that they fall back into piles of exhausted male torsos.

        The Pasha returns, disappointed with their behavior but clearly also having expected it. "Boys, boys, boys. I turn my back and there you are; slapping each other again. I couldn't trust any of you for a second. You make me sick."

       But his lines, declaimed with an almost weary recognition of the sexual desires that these men have no other way to release, as if he were simply singing a variation of the ditty, “What Do You Do With a Naked Sailor?” One almost senses, in fact, that he is awfully sorry he has missed all the fun; now what does he do with newly purchased condoms? Stay tuned. We’ll surely have to wait a while longer to find out.

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).

Larry Kennar | Spokane / 2004

the night i kissed a man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry Kennar (screenwriter and director) Spokane / 2004 [16.38 minutes]

 

Larry Kennar’s Spokane represents quite straight-forwardly the kind of sexual incident which happens millions of times each year but seldom gets spoken about or cinematically portrayed for a couple of reasons, the straight man—James (James Bornheimer), in this instance a close friend of the man to whose wedding they have just been—being afraid to reveal to anyone else that he has been interested in and explored gay sex, and the gay man—in this case the groom’s gay brother David (Jason Waters) terrified that he will be seen as having seduced his brother’s drunk friend to behave in a manner he would normally never have imagined. In the heterosexual world in which David as grown up, gay men are often seen as predators.

     In this 16.38-minute film cut from the original of about 29 minutes—the original evidently beginning at the wedding, taking them to a strip club, and to a bedroom hotel room where they engage in clumsy sex—eschews almost all narrative and, as the two comment on a straight sex film James briefly watches in the hotel room—they immediately “get down to business.”

     But “business,” in this case, is a slightly preposterous situation since the straight man has no experience in being properly seduced. It’s strange because I’d never thought about it before, but in many a gay encounter both men simultaneously play the role as willing seducers and those being seduced. And there is a kind of interchange between the two that perhaps does not occur as much in male / female sex, although I may be mistaken. In this instance, nonetheless, James is entirely passive, David forced to set up the TV with a heterosexual porn tape, make his guest comfortable, take off his shoes, strip off his pants and undershorts, put on his condom (although no anal penetration occurs), and engage in pre-sex play.

     Finally, the best David can do his jack-off his friend, and even that ends in basically mutual self-masturbation with a kiss or two thrown in by David.

      To describe it as a sexual act is to elevate it from the mutual masturbation experience that many straight male friends have as adolescents. In short, it is nothing truly special—except these are not teenage boys but grown men who discovered that they truly enjoy one another’s company and, perhaps, have suddenly fallen a bit in love.

       But when James awakens, quietly puts on his clothes and tiptoes out, we know that since David is flying off again that morning, there will probably never be another meeting of the two, that love or even friendship between them can be no more than their one-night stand, something almost forgettable. James will never be able to accept the fact that he might truly have also homosexual desires, that he might be like the so many millions of people who identify themselves as such, a bisexual. He will return to his girlfriend, wife, or porn tapes, or possibly all three while trying to put the incident out of his mind by chalking it up to a drunken night.

       Or maybe not. He might live out the rest of his life wondering in the back chambers of his mind. It is David who can truly forget it and see it for what it was, the comedy of heterosexual exclusivity, the dark heart of homophobia. Someday James might admit to his kids, “I kissed a man once.” But probably not.

 

Los Angeles, May 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).