Passion still burns

Several years before his defiant, subversive talent went off the boil, Roman Polanski's 1962 hit (re-released as star of the NFT's month-long Polanski season) arrived like a perfect thing: fierce, sexy, full of extraordinary moments.

The action takes places over a couple of days on a modest yacht on a lake in rural Poland. A middle-class couple invite a young hitchhiker to take a trip with them and at first the trio have a fine time, fussing with the sails, tanning on the decks. But, quickly, a competitive air comes to dominate, as the wife, bespectacled and dour in the opening scenes of the film, is transformed into a brown, intense beauty, gobsmacking in a bikini.

Both men jostle to be skipper. Husband is a posturing alpha male, listening to boxing on the radio, handling the rigging as though it were the weight of a toothpick. The hitchhiker is lean and blonde and hard to read.

This is a real clash of power, of personalities, and a clash, too, of opposing kinds of leading men: one belonging to straightforward narrative cinema, where men are men; the other to the freewheeling New Wave, of which, with this film at least, Polanski was a promising light.

There is such hate in the air. Even the weather seems overwhelmingly opinionated. Frequently the sky squats above, black, and the cast go into the cabin to sit as though deep in some pit, miles below the earth.

Knife in the Water is a very violent film, but in a breathless, understated way. Things rarely come to blows, but you feel they might, they ought, they surely will.

Knife In The Water (Noz W Wodzie)
Cert: PG