Roman Polanski
Rosemary's Baby

SHAKE THE CRADLE (IN TIME).

The devil's eyes look West, in the feverish Sixty-Eight that surprises the pale and dusty bourgeois Eden of the United States. In the darkness of human misery, it finds a reason for interest and barely concealed curiosity in the fervor of the youth uprising, often naively lost in a dialectic that could reestablish a different social order. When instead it is a mere tool for the System's use and consumption. The Cultural Revolution in China. The workers' struggles. The proud Vietcong resistance in the jungles of Indochina, against the American invader. Satan furiously wags his tail and spits blood on the fertile ground of rhetoric and foolish abnegation. He smiles at you smugly, with the fierce grin of an insurance policy salesman, and lays his bony, greasy hand on your hunched shoulder. The sky was a cloud of death and toxic air, on the night of August 9, '69 in Bel Air.

"Rosemary's Baby" as an cinematic nightmare, the customs checkpoint at the border between reality and fantasy, the imaginary, and the surrounding objective. Somewhat like what simmered within Roman Polanski, almost surprised by the socio-political tumult of the era, a detached observer with the falsely nonconformist attitude of the European dandy. Folded only onto his own "powerful" imagination, on his author's flair. The Polish director, naturalized and engulfed by the star-spangled culture after his exploits with Repulsion and Cul De Sac, wanted to give a sequel to the vampiric farce of The Fearless Vampire Killers, this time in a more subtle, ambiguous, "diabolic" key. A black comedy, a dream-nightmare that denied any easy escape route: thus Rosemary's Baby was born. Based on the bestseller of the same name by Ira Levin, it illustrates the strange events (hallucinations?) of Rosemary Woodhouse, on the brink of childbirth, and her husband Guy, a young couple newly moved into an old and infamously known building, the Bramford, amidst sorcery and ancestral sabbaths in the heart of 1960s New York. The distorted and frightened gaze of the efebo-like Mia Farrow, with her childlike face and very short hair, distills anguish in the protagonist Rosemary, obsessed by a demonic conspiracy against the creature she carries in her womb; perpetrated by the elderly co-tenants Castevet, sorcerers camouflaged in the festive clothing of New York's middle-class. The constant reassurances from her husband Guy Woodhouse (interpreted by the future icon of independent U.S. cinema John Cassavetes) will not be enough to break the mystery, the dreamlike fascination from the doubt of a real damnation in Rosemary: instead, in the finale mirroring the Christian Apocalypse, the caring and careerist Guy will play anything but a minor role.

"Rosemary's Baby" is therefore also the subjective nightmare of the petite bourgeois heroine, who, by rejecting imminent motherhood, transfers onto those close to her (seemingly affectionate) a latent repulsion (and Repulsion returns, that is, mental dissociation, the purifying mental illness in a bourgeois and deceitful society). A metaphor of satanic rites and occult magic, orchestrating the painful stages of Rosemary's integration into a "new world," to which she feels she does not belong but must accept. A hallucinated journey where, as in all Polanski's cinema, it is the irrational, the unthinkable that defines the final victory of Evil. There is no pacifying "happy ending," because according to Polanski the violated order plunges the West into an irreversible process of self-annihilation and decomposition. In other words, behind the hypocritical facade of respectability and mystification we hide, and defend, the ideal Nothingness. Something stirs nervously in the cradle. Smell of sulfur.

"..I am an atheist. Therefore, accepting what happens in Rosemary's Baby would be against who I am and what I believe in. Therefore, I was not, nor am I afraid. But I would like to find a sort of drug that would allow me to completely forget the film and to go see it for the first time as my friends did..Unfortunately, since I made the film and I do not believe in either God or the Devil, I am doubly incapable of being afraid of my film, which bores me greatly.."

(from an interview in Les Cahiers Du Cinéma, January 1969).