What? (1972)

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Dir. Roman Polanski

I admit that rather than dig into an auteur's canon through the best work, as according to canon, I sometimes end up drifting to the lesser knowns of their careers or the oddities. Failures and miscreants. As much as F For Fake (1973) is a masterpiece from Orson Welles, usually its Touch of Evil (1958) after Citizen Kane (1941) in people's minds while I'm more inclined to dive for the former. My habit connected to how DVDs are released, snapping on the first time releases of an obscurity like a dog on fire. Or when rare screenings are shown on TV that are not easily available. But this habit, because of my peculiar "grab-the-film-in-proximity" mentality, has meant I've had a new side to the question of what auteurism means. Rewatching What?, how am I going to view this as a Roman Polanski film, as I've only seen a couple, and by itself? What exactly is What? By itself, and why has it got that title let alone is how it is? Along with Louis Malle's Black Moon (1975) and Claude Chabrol's Alice Or The Last Escapade (1977), this is another European auteur who decides to do something different by riffing on Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland.

Nancy (Sydne Rome) escapes from a group of men in a taxi, a wide eyed naive American on vacation in Italy, only to end up at a holiday villa cut off in its own eccentric world. Legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni is Alex, a former pimp turned masculine lizard with an eye on Nancy and many peculiar fetishes. There are a pair of British lads, the third friend Polanski himself as Mosquito, with his "Little Stinger", a harpoon in a dumb sex reference. The owner of the villa (Hugh Griffith) is near death and has the eye for Nancy, as does everyone else, such a shambolic man who can play Mozart despite arthritis in his hands. Add a priest, an older American couple, and two women, one usually completely naked, to the mix and a wacky sex comedy is the result. The villa itself is as much of a character. Full of art - Francis Bacon above the bed, Roy Lichtenstein printed on the carpet - and is placed next to an idyllic coast line. Nancy has to both deal with the people in the villa and the villa itself - déjà vu, objects breaking when she just touches them, and more and more of her clothes being stolen and torn. Honestly What? is a weird film. I've overused this word, something I've had to kerb, but it applies for this film. [My Collins Gem dictionary defines weird as "strange or bizarre; unearthly or eerie"] Films that I have praised have been defined as weird because they've broken away from convention; unfortunately I've over the years clouded the term with a vagueness, as someone whose only actually looked at its meaning in the dictionary. What? is weird, but unfortunately it's also slight.

It looks beautiful at least. Two cinematographers - Marcello Gatti and Giuseppe Ruzzolini - and the setting for the erotic farce is perfect for the cinema screen. Expansive ocean. Old Italian architecture.  A tower. Vast corridors. Passage ways and balconies. To reach a room just above you, where a ping pong ball has fallen from which Alex has an irresistible urge to crush to hear the crunching sound, you have to pass through a lengthy journey inside to reach it. Hidden away in obscurity until a few years back, the premise of What? would have worked beautifully, and it does stand out as an absurdist work. Alice In Wonderland but as conceived as more directly sexual and about cross cultural relations, the American in not only Europe but the cinema of Europe, a Polish director, Rome an Italian actress of American birth, Mastroianni and a cross pollination of actors including from Britain. The problems, on a second viewing, is the execution that is full of flabbiness and vagueness. Its tone is immediately off, with discomfort, as a comedy when it starts with Nancy escaping a gang rape in a taxi, which is immediately setting up the film as prickly in its content. The real life events of Polanski causes a problem when viewing this film because, as an erotic absurdist piece, the crime he committed in real life, whether you can separate this from his films or find him completely reprehensible, have a bitter taste to some of the content in What?. It's not that Nancy is continually naked or in a state of undress for most of the film. Nor the kinky and lurid tone. The problems are both how asinine, and merely crass, the sex jokes are and how insipid Nancy is as a main character. It's a problem that the opening involves a near-gang rape done in a jokey way, her backside is continually pinched and she's lusted over by all the men because she is such a blank individual who doesn't take consideration of what's fully going on, the only register that of a deer caught in the headlights. Her submissiveness to Alex is bad not because she's submissive to him but there's no sense of reasonable depth to it even for a sex farce. The tone that would try a gang rape as a joke makes this worse . (Such a tricky, discomforting concept like rape has only been justifiable as a joke, and a good one, from what I've seen in Pedro Almodóvar's Kika (1993) because the joke is on the patheticness of the rapist.)

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Rome is merely pulled along as Nancy, without any real interest for herself onscreen for us to care about her. The Alice In Wonderland scenario, depending on the version, is usually of an onlooker to the scenarios played out, but they can still interact with what happens with some spirit to them. Mentioning Black Moon, actress Cathryn Harrison's protagonist still interacts constantly to the events that take place, as does Sylvia Kristel's in ...the Last Escapade. Nancy could have worked as a character, a stereotype of the youth, the American, who believes in expanding her mind - bell bottom jeans,  yoga, travelling the world - yet has no idea what the old continent of Europe actually is, befitting a subject for the Polish Polanski if he was actually at his best. Her asking of someone's Zodiac abruptly to deaf ears or talking about a philosophy book she's read, she's a caricature of the middle class youth who believes in improving the world but is pretty useless in contributing anything of use, which unfortunately is not used enough. Most of the film is of Nancy in increasingly less interesting sexual scenarios. The character never progresses enough from her views being bashed by the lustings of mad perverts. Rome is just a pretty face, her voice is too thin when you need to depict an extremely naive woman who slowly realises the place she's in is alien to her.

It's a film made on a lark, which would have worked if it was actually daring and chaotic to befit a Wonderland scenario. It has its virtues indeed, but only really in style and Mastroianni. To see him, who dominated La Dolce Vita (1960)  and 8 1/2 (1963), in a tiger suit being whipped is on for the bucket list of viewing experiences, but even if it wasn't his voice heard in the English dub, he still brings a damn fine performance physically to the work. Moments where a better film exists are there. The curtain rail of Nancy's rail falling off and literally every object is almost against her.  A random moment where her left thigh is painted blue. All of this would as madness where nothing for her is going to assist her in the villa, as time repeats over and over again. But the film eventually peters out. After trying to admire it as a flawed gem, I eventually gave up from when Hugh Griffith is introduced. Eventually the most the other characters say to Nancy are directions around the villa or how they admire her breasts, something I found a mere flaw, without any real glee in the sexual humour like a good bawdy work, but just becomes irritating and questionable. It adds a creepiness in its lifelessness without even mentioning Polanski's real life events. The tone, after I stopped deluding myself, is just off, not working at all. The jokes are obvious or non-existent, the lost potential for this scenario felt, worse when its director knew how to do the abstract in his darker material. It's a film that's pleased with itself but fails miserably barring a few virtues.

It does beg the question of what an auteur means when this exists in the director's filmography. It's a fascinating and memorable work, but surely this upsets what Polanski's career means with its existence? And what does it mean if there are people like Jonathan Rosenbaum who put it amongst his essential films of cinema's existence? Am I blind? I fully endorse auteurism as a theory, worship at the shrine of it honestly, but my belief is counter balanced with the realisation that cinema is both the work of many people and that, no matter much I try, there'll always be the odd ones out that prevent the theory from being complete truth. What? eventually drags on, never progressing in tone like the other films referenced in this review. By the end it merely finishes. Leaving the film the viewer finally finds out what the title means, which is, an intended baffling of the audience. "It's the title of the movie!" Nancy shouts to Alex, leaving in the back of a truck, completely naked, full of pigs, suddenly breaking the forth wall. It lacks the subversive and abrupt undermining of it Jean-Luc Godard did very well in two of his late sixties films, Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Week End (1967). Instead it comes off as laboured and missing the point of what it should be doing with its ideas. What? sits at odds in a really tumultuous time in Polanski's life, and even without this in the back of my mind, the film comes off as a bad surreal film. I thought I could appreciate all 'weird' films, but this one is laboured by its end, proving there is a difference when one actually has the spontaneity and creativity that make them great. What? as a title perfectly sums it up, ill-advisedly, in that its title suggests befuddlement in the film because nothing of interest is explained. 

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