One gets the feeling when reading about Roman Polanski that his body of work cannot be easily taken in as a whole; unlike, say, Fellini, whose work is comprehended so often in totality that the expression Felliniesque makes sense to virtually all movie buffs. But, ‘Polanski-esque’? Never. There are many who only know the Polish/French director by his earlier works such as Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). There are others who claim to “just love” Polanski, but only know Chinatown (1974). (One needs not mention those who only know him through tabloid headlines and his personal misfortunes.)

The argument can be made, however, that Polanski is every bit as much an auteur director as such masters as Godard or Almódovar, and that to understand one film directed by Polanski is to gain insight into all of his work. There is, in short, a coherence, an aesthetic, and there is a thematic obsession.

Many film buffs of my generation came to his masterpiece Chinatown without ever realizing that it was directed by the same director of Rosemary’s Baby. Much of the publicity emphasized the brilliance of the widely praised script by Robert Towne, without revealing that the project offered to the director by actor Jack Nicholson and producer Robert Evans was only accepted by Polanski on condition that he be allowed to substantially rewrite the script, turning it from a mushy melodrama with a happy ending to the tragedy that we all love and honor.  Film instructor Robert McGee has said that “everything that makes Chinatown a work of art” can be attributed to Polanski, not to Robert Towne. 

Polanski, my point is, turned the Robert Towne screenplay into a Roman Polanski film by radically altering the ending. The film we now know and love fits perfectly into the director’s tragic view of life, mirroring the themes we find in such Hitchcockian horror films as Repulsion and The Tenant. Chinatown, after all, once understood among LA police as a place-specific reference to impenetrable corruption, becomes in Polanski’s hands a location of evil, not that far from the home of Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) in Rosemary’s Baby.

An alternate title for Chinatown might just as well be Evelyn’s Baby. Certainly, by keeping her sister/daughter hidden from view, mother Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) succeeds in creating for detective Gittes (Jack Nicholson) as much mystery as does Rosemary when she first peers into the bassinet holding her (we assume) freakish newborn (Does it have horns and a little red tail?). Is Noah Cross (John Huston) not shown to be every bit as devil as the creature said to have fathered Rosemary’s baby? I would say that Cross – in a memorable performance by director John Huston – embodies pure evil.

What distinguishes Chinatown from Polanski’s other major films (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant) is that the film stays in reality. Private detective Gittes may not understand what he is up against, as Noah Cross advises him, but ignorance is not the same as delusion. Evelyn Mulwray is not having hallucinations, as do Polanski’s other protagonists: Catherine Deneuve (Repulsion), Mia Farrow (Rosemary’s Baby), and Roman Polanski himself (The Tenant) are losing their minds (if not stark raving mad). 

Viewers are faced with a swirl of events occasioned by sexually-charged madness, including suicide, incest, adultery, sadism, rape, and torture. Polanski, playing a Polish expat living in Paris, assumes the psyche of the previous tenant, a woman, who died by leaping out the apartment window. Descending into madness, he/she kills himself in exactly the same way as she did. We watch Polanski in his wig, panties, and nail polish fly out the window twice. What is different with Mulwray is that she is sane and remains so. Gittes may have trouble keeping up, but the things Evelyn accuses her father of are all horrifyingly true. What she has in common with the others, mad though they may be, is that she is the victim. Great evil has come to these women in one form or another but they themselves have perpetrated no acts of evil or harmed anyone, although Carol (Catherine Deneuve) in Repulsion sinking into a state of near catatonia kills to defend herself against real or imagined rapists. 

Critics understandably have wanted to find a way of understanding Chinatown by placing it in film history. Many have done so by calling the film neo-noir, or film noir. This is possible but I am persuaded by Robert McGee not to see it this way. If Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) is neo-noir, Chinatown surely is not. In the first place, the film is set in 1937; not the fifties. This is still Raymond Chandler’s town, not Ross McDonald’s. (Paul Newman was pre-pubescent.)  It is in color. It is a whodunit, as are many film noir classics, but it is a tragedy, not a melodrama. The world does not bounce back. After all, the female protagonist is murdered; she is no femme fatale.  The world for Jake Gittes and the audience is forever changed. No one comes away believing that the corruption or evil once exposed can be confined to a single time and place again. Chinatown is no longer a neighborhood but a state of mind. The whole city, if not the country, is Chinatown. There is no restoration of order at the end of the movie; there is no going back to the age of innocence.

There is no chance of reintegration. We are in the end individuals, left alone to survive or not. In Chinatown, all hope is lost. In film noir, there is usually a clear conflict between good and evil. In Chinatown, the good are no more; Mr. and Mrs. Mulwray are both dead, murdered by Noah Cross who has taken possession of his daughter/granddaughter, virtually kidnapping her after having her mother shot. Only the world of Chinatown remains. Evil triumphs.

The entire world is Chinatown. Jake is a survivor but he has no life outside Chinatown to return to. In Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Rosemary is given a choice by her husband and his friend, a syringe-threatening psychiatrist; she must join the coven and embrace her role as the mother of Satan or be declared insane, drugged, and institutionalized. We assume she chooses life. In The Tenant (1976) the life of the suicidal woman is imitated exactly; he, the Polish expat Trikovski, now becomes her, puts on her clothes, her make-up, and buys a wig; Polanski, in full drag, attempts to kill him/herself twice, and is left mummified in the hospital ward to scream forever through his/her toothless mouth.

When watching Polanski, one does not think of film noir classics such as Asphalt Jungle, Sunset Boulevard, or The Wrong Man. One thinks instead of Psycho: you have the loss of identity, the madness, the sexual confusion, even death.

Only in The Pianist (2002) is there hope, but not necessarily for us. Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), the renowned Polish-Jewish pianist is saved when he plays Chopin so beautifully that he wins over the Nazi Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann) who happens upon the desperate, starving man, dressed in rags, and hiding out in a bombed-out townhouse. It is thirty degrees below zero outside.

The pianist has been through hell, having finally escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, but is in no way certain of his safety. He could easily be shot by the officer right then and there, or he could be left to die eventually of dehydration or starvation. Instead, the officer is moved by Szpilman’s expert piano playing. The evil man becomes a human being right before our eyes. He awakens to the reality of Szpilman’s genius and cannot bring himself to do him harm. The music Szpilman plays on the dusty piano is extraordinary. The officer is transformed. It is as if this dreadful man, this Nazi killer, had found a Rembrandt painting beneath the rubble and, depraved as he may be, cannot bring himself to step on it. 

It is the film’s greatest moment. The officer doesn’t “like” Szpilman – it is not personal – no, what Polanski shows in this scene is the transcendent power of music; he affirms the power of culture to humanize even the most dreadful human beast. He doesn’t have the men hug; they don’t cry; they don’t celebrate in any way. Instead, the officer gives the pianist some food and then in the coming days returns with his arms full of black bread and jam which he smuggles in to pathetic Szpilman who is hanging out in the attic. He must do this behind the backs of his fellow Nazis. Finally, when the officer receives orders to leave, he removes his heavy winter coat and hands it over to Szpilman. We see now that the pianist will survive.

In short, the Nazi saves the Jewish pianist’s life. When the ceasefire is declared, Szpilman makes his way back to Warsaw in triumph. In the last scene, he is not stuffing his face on some magnificent succulent pig, swilling pilsner, he is not in bed with some luscious stacked prostitute, he is not crying at the burial site of his murdered family, no. We see the man playing the piano. He does make an effort to find the kind German officer who saved his life but he has been taken by the Soviets as a prisoner of war. In the end, Szpilman returns to work. We find him at the music studio recording classical music for radio broadcast. 

We may be born sweet innocents, Polanski seems to suggest, but we enter at our peril a world consumed by sinister forces. My favorite scene? Isabelle Adjani in The Tenant sits in movie-theatre darkness rubbing Trikovski’s (Polanski’s) responsive crotch as Bruce Lee on screen is kicking the shit out of his opponents in a brilliant scene from Operation Dragon.  My favorite line? Again, from The Tenant: “You’re make a great deal of noise, monsieur.” Polanski’s facial response is priceless. 

What I take from The Pianist and Polanski’s other films is the suggestion that human beings may come and go, miserable though we may be, but music – and perhaps all culture – must be allowed to flourish.