Amazon.com Essentials:
Roman Polanski's film adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's stunning play about the
legacy of
torture has more in common with the director's first film, Knife in the
Water (with
all the latter's unnerving ambiguities about power, sexual transgression,
and confused
alliances among three people) than a straightforward political parable.
Sigourney Weaver (a
bit underwhelming in this role, but good overall) plays a former political
prisoner in an
unnamed South American country that has gone democratic. She is married to
a
government official (fine work by Stuart Wilson) heading up official
inquiries into the
practice of torture under the former regime. Still shattered by her
experience, Weaver's
character seeks safe haven in closets of the cliff-top house she shares with
her husband. But
when the latter comes home in the company of a seemingly nice fellow (a
brilliant Ben
Kingsley), she believes she recognizes the stranger as the interrogator who
raped her
repeatedly in prison. She violently takes him hostage, and what ensues is a
hurricane of
fury and confusion, as Kingsley's terrified character denies all
accusations, Wilson's guilt-ridden spouse can't decide whom to defend, and
Weaver turns her
psychosexual rage into a
weapon of humiliation. Dorfman adapted the screenplay himself, but there's
no question
that Polanski is leading us down a familiar path of human betrayal and
terror that he
crossed in such films as Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion, and
Bitter
Moon. At times stunning in its bluntness and compelling to the last,
Death and the
Maiden literally takes us to the edge of oblivion, where--in Polanski's
films--the hardest
truths always seem to fall into a heretofore unknown perspective. --Tom
Keogh
