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Rating: Planning to spend the weekend on their boat, a journalist and his wife meet a hitchhiking student on the way to the marina. They offer him to join them for the short vacation.
With two novice actors (Jolanta Umecka as the journalist's wife and Zygmunt Malanowicz as the young man) and a personal background of just a few short films, Roman Polanski, a Polish director and actor, makes his debut behind the camera with an Oscar nomination for best foreign film and the FIPRESCI prize for best direction.
The story of “Knife in the Water” (1962) is about the confrontation between two opposing worlds (the journalist, the young man) held together by the same common denominator (the demonstration of superiority inherent in their own way of life) and based on the neurosis of possession (the young man's knife for the journalist, the latter's wife for the young man). The plot, which narratively serves as a pretext, is in fact inseparable from the cultural and social implications: the People's Republic of Poland has only recently entered the “liberal” phase of the communist regime (the young hitchhiker who disrupts the “totalitarian” balance of the bourgeois man) and the currents running through it bring with them the frustration of compromise and its consequent incompleteness (the elastic of tensions between the two men). The lake, a constant and “undefined” symbol on whose still surface human vicissitudes unfold and reflect, is a non-place of impressive yet simple effectiveness, and the female figure, initially an insignificant object of contention on par with a knife, rises to become a unique catalyst of the base impulses of a male chauvinist society, as well as (alone in being able to) a judge of the confrontation; thus the betrayal with the student becomes the most violent assertion of self possible, as well as the embryo of an attempt to escape the conscious lies and blindness that govern human relationships (she will confess everything to her husband, who will not believe her).
In a thrilling final half-hour, with a presumed dead (the young man), we arrive through a surprisingly skilled, thus mature, use of timing and the suspense they dictate, in an ironic play with which Polanski announces the explosion of the conflict, its point of no return, but then extends it, hides it, ties it back to the barely perceptible creases of the nerves and masks of the three souls on the boat. The perfect geometries that regulate the balance of the frames (the sharp angles of the hull and the sail, the constancy of the horizon, the sudden crossings of space by the protagonists), accompanied by a splendid black/white contrast, are the visual compendium of the first act of a career, that of Polanski, destined to mark, with many highs and some forgivable lows, world cinema in the second half of the twentieth century.
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