Knife in the Water

In Brief: World Cinema is revisiting Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water (1962). I do not doubt (or even question) the importance of this film to the career of Roman Polanski, but I’ve never really enjoyed it. I was too young to get it at all when I first saw it in high school on TV. (Mostly, it bored me then.) I “get it” now, and I can appreciate it, but I have to think long and hard to come up with a Polanski movie I wouldn’t rather be watching. It's the film that made him an international figure in the cinematic world — and, ironically, still stands as his only Polish-language feature, since it led to his departure for France and then to British cinema. The appeal of the film — a simple three-character story designed for getting the most out of a very small budget — is obvious even today. The movie is an economical exercise in the growing sexual and socio-economic tension that takes place in one afternoon when a middle-aged sportswriter and his much younger wife pick up a hitchhiking student and then invite him along for a day on their sailboat. The impetus of it all comes from the aging writer’s desire to show off how much more worldly and knowledgeable he is than the young man — and what results from that.