Rosemary's Baby

Every time Roman Polanski puts his name on a film, six dozen critics say he's out-Hitchcocked Hitchcock. Rosemary's Baby, a pointless and supremely mediocre melodrama, provoked the same now-customary response: one New York paper assumed confidently that Hitchcock would have been proud to have made it and, on nearer horizons, Boston After Dark's very own Deac Rossell (a nice tall boy who smiles a lot) decided to write a paramount press release calling Rosemary's Baby "worthy of the dean of film thrillers, Hitchcock." I get mad when I read this kind of nonsense. If Deac Rossell wants to lay his reputation on the line by joining a chorus echoing this most frivolous of statements, there's nothing I can do about it.

But count me out. Hitchcock wouldn't put his name anywhere near junk like Rosemary's Baby. Generalizing shamelessly, Hitchcock films make important, often positive, statements about a wide range of human problems. Polanski's films exist at best in tortured ambiguity and increasingly are sloppy stylistic exercises in low-level suspense mechanics.

Polanski's overrated Knife in the Water was at least well-paced and slick, exuding an unpretentious formalism we happily like to associate with good committed art. Since then, the money increased, Hollywood beckoned, Polanski learned English, and his films have apparently fallen into every cinematic pitfall readily available. Repulsion revelled in cheap lens distortion and sound effects, and The Fearless Vampire Killers was lousy with back-drops painted in poorly processed Metrocolor.

Rosemary's Baby is even more a media-mogul's product: Yamaha cycles, Pall Mall cigarettes, and assorted brand names are shown on TV sets, dropped on tables, and exhibited shamelessly throughout. The exteriors are bleached-out process shots taken on different days with no attempt made to reconcile light changes. When a little action is necessary, Polanski drags out the hand-held camera for some shaky realism (catch Hitchcock filming violence with a hand-held camera!); and repeatedly, Polanski substitutes tight close-ups for style. If nothing else, Rosemary's Baby is ugly--aesthetically derelict, the groping of a bombed-out mind.

But why should Rosemary's Baby be any good? A facile author thinks it would be fun to put a coven of witches in the Dakota (a fortress-like New York apartment house), writes a best seller, and sells it to Paramount which hires a fashionable director for a small fortune to make the movie. It's a sure-fire success formula--not exactly a sublime collaboration of great artists, let alone unusually talented craftsmen. Rosemary's Baby, then, would be easy to dismiss as a slack and inadequate thriller were it not for everyone's desire to take Polanski seriously as an auteur.

Seen in relation to Polanski's previous work, Rosemary's Baby is distressing. Given that his films concern human isolation and the problems therein, Polanski stopped looking for solutions with Cul-de-sac which ends hopelessly with all relationships breaking down and everyone left in their own tortured hell. Not content to leave his films in limbo, Polanski seems to offer a solution to isolation by affirming the brotherhood of devil worship and the black forces, rather than warning us of their existence.

Seen in isolation, The Fearless Vampire Killers is just a bad joke: a little kid's desire to let the bad guys win for once as realized by a thirty-year-old adolescent mentality. But Rosemary's Baby is on their side too; the witches win, Rosemary accepts Satan's spawn as her son, and Polanski's careful dating of 1966 as the year One (the black calendar beginning with the birth of the son of Satan) suggests that 1968 is the year Three, that all things malevolent are heartily thriving.

Not that I want to be stuffy or anything, but all this just isn't good. Grown-ups shouldn't want the bad guys to win. They can erase the black-and-white division between good and evil, or make it tougher for the good guys, or even cloud everything in ambiguity. But there are too many reasons around for not affirming devil worship to allow us to accept Polanski's recent films without pausing for thought.

Were he a better film-maker, someone with a decent sense of camera and editing, we could call him an auteur and grant him his own strange bag, but as it stands now, all we can do is wonder where on earth the man's mind is at.