TESS
Directed by Roman Polanski Screenplay by Gérard Brack, Roman Polanski and John Brownjohn
Tess seems to be more an act of atonement than of creation, Roman Polanski's way of saying he's sorry for his scandalous reputation and his status as a fugitive from American—or at least Cal-ifornian—justice. He is telling the world that underneath it all, he is really a very serious fellow, if by serious one means that he is as capable as Irving Thalberg or David O. Selznick or any other old time mogul of making a handsomely illustrated version of a literary classic.
One emerges from his endless version of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles with a sense that one could have read the book in a shorter span and had more fun too. There is no question that Polanski's images—with Brittany doubling for "Wessex"—are frequently striking. He does less well by Tess, the poor doomed girl who, forced to rise above her station by family ambition, is ruined by a rascally wastrel and then misunderstood by the prig to whom she gives her heart. Everyone the director sets to moving through Wessex clumps along very slowly, weighed down by the invisible chains of Hardy's famous Fate. His leading lady, Nastassia Kinski, a truly beautiful young woman (see last year's Stay As You Are), is further burdened by her attempt to speak with an authentic West Country accent. She does all right considering that she is German, but the effort seems to slow her speech. Or maybe she was directed to carry on portentously. Even her love scenes are handled with ludicrous discretion. One comes to imagine that she has been impregnated with her illegitimate child by Fate itself, since it is impossible to think that any human could get through the 40 yds. or so of stout English cloth that Polanski insists on wrapping around her.
This film is running for one week in New York and Los Angeles to qualify for Academy nominations. It is the sort of ponderously aspiring twaddle that sometimes wins Oscars—especially when it presents Hollywood a chance to welcome back a suitably repentant sinner. But the once cheerfully perverse director of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown ought to remember that being an artist means never having to say you're sorry.
—R.S.