Summary:
While on vacation in Paris, a doctor’s wife disappears and he finds himself wrapped up in the Parisian underbelly.
My Thoughts:
One of my goals in regarding TMM this year was to finish reviewing all of the films in certain directors’ oeuvres, and Polanski was one of those directors. Funnily enough, Polanski’s “The Tenant” was the first film I ever reviewed for this site. I’ve come back to him multiple times in the last year (though, upon inspection, it seems this is only the fourth film of his I’ve reviewed- I’ve got a ways to go to round out his filmography). I find Polanski to be a director who is always attentive to detail, and even his lesser films usually have something that they’re trying to say. While he himself is a controversial character (see the documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” for more information), I find that I can’t stay away from his work. The Apartment Trilogy (“Repulsion”, “Rosemary’s Baby”, “The Tenant”) is pretty much a perfect psychological horror trilogy in my opinion; “Chinatown” is a great noir thriller with an ending that really lingers; “Tess” is one of the greatest adaptations of a novel I’ve seen; “The Pianist” is a deeply personal and haunting period piece… Heck, I’ll defend “Death and the Maiden”, “Cul-De-Sac”, “Venus in Furs”, The Ghost Writer, and “The Fearless Vampire Killers” as good movies, and a few others as watchable ones. Anyways, long story short, I’m watching through all of his films this year. This wasn’t one of Polanski’s best films, but it’s still a decent movie.
It’s like “Taken”, only slower, and sponsored by Pizza Hut.
“You want your wife back or what?”
Richard Walker (Harrison Ford, “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade”) and his wife Sondra (Betty Buckley, “Split”) arrive in Paris on vacation. When they check into their hotel they realize Sondra has grabbed the wrong suitcase. Richard hops in the shower and when he gets out he finds Sondra missing. Frantic, he tries to find any clues as to where his wife might’ve gone. Eventually, Richard runs into Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner, “Venus in Fur”), the owner of the mistaken suitcase, whom believes she might be able to help Richard locate his wife.
One of the things I mentioned I really like about Polanski is he seems to always be trying to say something with his films. “Frantic” talks a lot about the cold indifference of the universe to your problems, and that was kind of a unique theme to have in a thriller like this. For perhaps the first hour of the film, after Richard’s wife is kidnapped, Richard himself plays by the rules: he fills out a police report, goes to the embassy, searches the streets… but everywhere he goes, people treat him with a kind of nonchalance: his wife is missing, sure, but it’s not their problem. That theme of indifference really helps the second half of the film when Richard is forced to start taking action. The problem with this theme is it really slows up the pacing for a little bit in the first and second acts- there’s enough intrigue that I wouldn’t call this film boring, but titling it “Frantic” is certainly misleading. We spend the first half of the film wading through a frustrating amount of bureaucracy, before Richard finally decides to break free from the rules.
Polanski’s directing was on point here; lots of deep staging and shots with dynamic framing. He knows how to frame a shot so that your eye is immediately drawn to the most important thing in that shot, and he uses that a lot in this film to hint at things that will be important in the future. I do have to say that he also used that technique to bring attention to the product placement in this movie. While usually I can ignore product placement, it gets distracting when the first thing my eye sees in ten or twelve shots is a huge Pizza Hut sign, or a carton of Marlboros, or an American Express Card. We get it- movies take money to make- but lets be a bit subtler.
As far as acting goes Harrison Ford did a fine job. He plays a typical Hitchcockian thriller character- an innocent man wrapped up in a world he knows nothing about. It’s a role we’ve seen him play a dozen times before (“The Fugitive”, “Firewall”, erm… “Cowboys & Aliens”); he plays the role well, but he doesn’t deliver anything Oscar-worthy. Emmanuelle Seigner, whom I really only know from her collaborations with Polanski, was sort of stilted in her line delivery and she wasn’t ever quite convincing when she needed to convey real emotion. Almost a year after this movie came out, Seigner and Polanski were married, and she appears in a great deal of his other films from then on- so I’ll let you draw conclusions as to why she was cast as a lead in this movie.
Verdict:
This is a pretty decent film. It’s not a great movie, but if you run across it on Netflix someday its worth a watch. Ford is entertaining as always; Polanski tries desperately to say something worth hearing in the first half of the film, and in the second half he gives us some pretty tense movements. This is a fun European thriller in the same vein of a lot of Hitchcock wrong-man movies, it’s just not as memorable as some of Polanski’s masterpieces.
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