Polanski Prettified

WHAT TESS needs is an introduction by Alistair Cooke. He'd lend Roman Polanski's lush adaption of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles an appropriately ceremonious mood, sitting in his studio library, staring down his Coriolanian proboscis and solemnly intoning "Fate deals the cards with the deck stacked against you...and you must play out your hand. Fate moves you like a pawn across the chessboard of life. Fate..." In Polanski's hands, Hardy's tragedy is like an extravagantly produced episode of Masterpiece Theater, the sauntering tale of a country lass victimized by forces beyond her control in Victorian England, the film oozes refinement; it is genteel to the point of passivity.

Polanski seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of Thomas Hardy. Hardy rebelled against the genteel tradition in Victorian literature. His novels describe violence, poverty and, particularly, sexuality with startling candor. He scandalized the literary classes with his disdain for repressive society, his grim mockery of propriety. His works were bold, cynical, and for most of his audience, shocking--not unlike the more familiar work of film director Polanski. Perhaps it was their shared obsessions with the impervious force of Evil, the cruelty of the bourgoisie, and the sudden, unpredictable groin-kicks of Fate that initially attracted Polanski to Hardy. But, somewhere along the line, the director vaguely misconstrued the writer's art. For most of its three hours, Polanski seems to be adapting Emily Bronte, not Thomas Hardy.

Polanski's style is relentlessly Romantic, his pacing languorous. A procession of cheery young girls, clad in white, approach us from far down the dusty country road. They pass two by two, voices twittering, hair shining, eyes dancing. They disappear slowly into the hilly countryside. Later, a kind farm apprentice helps four damsels dressed in their Sunday-best across an enormous knee-deep puddle. He carries one across and then returns for another, carries second across and then returns for the third, etc. Later, a small army of fox-hunters glide on horseback through an early morning mist. Across the foggy plain they ride, their red coats flapping behind them. Polanski takes his time with every scene, the effects ranging from mesmerizing to anesthetizing. The sumptuous photography of Geoffrey Unsworth and Ghislain Cloquet rescues several scenes from fatal tedium, always enchanting the eye even when the mine has wandered. Their compositions of toiling farmers framed by a purple sky are almost painfully beautiful if more than a little reminiscent of Nesto Almendros' work in Day of Heaven.

Phillipe Sarde's gushy score highlights Polanski's excessive Romanticism. When lovers passionately embrace or horses gallop into the distance, the music swells dramatically, reminding that this is a stirring moment. The Romantic flourishes become so predictable that Polanski almost parodies soppy filmmaking. He bombards with shots of gentle animals: deer, cows, wans, all of them looking as though they might, at any moment, transform into a Stubbs oil. Polanski even presents the film's little bit of gore with extreme tameness. His relentless diffidence weakens a potentially powerful story. We watch with a dreamy disinterest as Fate designs it tapestry of despair. BecauseTess' story doesn't possess the shock value it had when Hardy wrote it almost a century ago, the film needs more vibrant and innovative direction to involve an audience. Tess is a cold tragedy.

SOMEWHERE, buried deep within Nastassia Kinski, is an actress. Unfortunately, she doesn't emerge in Tess. As Hardy's "pure woman." Kinski shows flashes of genuine expertise. She makes running a hand through her hair a profound expression of violently contradictory emotions; her quick, reluctant smile exudes poignancy. Physically, she is the perfect realization of Polanski's idea of "provocative beauty." Her full lips suggest a smoldering sensuality, undetectable in those Bambi-esque eyes. Even the tiny scar on her left cheek seems to heighten her beauty, like Gene Tierney's over-bite. The trouble with Kinski is her voice, a wonderfully funny, squeaky little thing. It quivers and gurgles and struggles to capture an English accent but sounds oddly Irish instead. She rushes to finish many of her lines, as though by hurrying, she could hide that prepubescent tremulousness in her delivery.

Kinski' Tess, like the film itself, lacks vigor. Her naivete digresses into weakness. Yes, Tess is a hopeless victim of an indifferent universe, but Hardy's character possessed a spiritual fortitude that vanishes in Kinski's performance. When Tess finally tries to seize control of her life, to alter her Fate, we cannot believe the aggressiveness of her action. Kinski can't change the overall tone of her performance after nearly three hours of teary timidity.

Peter Firth plays Tess' pious husband and Leigh Lawson the sly rogue who seduces her. Under Polanski's direction, both characters are shallow and tiresome. Firth and Lawson, both competent actors, struggle to give compelling performances--but with Sarde's strings rising behind them as they utter lines like "Is there no hope for me? I'm dying for you my darling," they fight a losing battle.

Naturally, Fate wins his hand. But so what? After three hours, Polanski's experiment in gentility is over. As Thomas Hardy turns in his grave, we fervently hope that Polanski returns to the cynicism, the terror, and the grotesquery of the Twentieth century that he translates so well into art.