Being of Polish extraction and possessing a worldview that could be rightfully described
as sometimes leaning towards the dark and cynical, I have always felt a natural
affinity towards the films of Roman Polanski. And if I were forced to select
one of his films as my favorite, I would not hesitate for a second to name what
continues to be, at least on the surface, the most idiosyncratic work of his
career, his 1980 knockout “Tess.” At the time that it was being
produced, the idea of Polanski lending his dark cinematic approach to a period
adaptation of Thomas Hardy‘s tragic 1891 novel “Tess of the
d’Urbervilles,” seemed like a bizarre and ultimately doomed move from a
filmmaker reeling from a series of personal and professional disasters stemming
from an incident that, in the interest of saving space, will receive no further
lucubration here. Therefore, critics and audiences alike were surprised to
discover that Polanski had presented them with a film that was both a fairly
faithful adaptation of the source material and a deeply personal work that told
its dark tale with a powerful emotional undercurrent that he had never
demonstrated before and which he would not approximate again until he made
“The Pianist” two decades later.
Although
distributors were initially wary of the film—it took more than a year after
its European debut before it was picked up for American release—”Tess” went on to be a surprise hit, despite its
seemingly uncommercial nature, that earned Polanski some of the best reviews of
his career and won three Academy Awards out of six nominations. And yet, when
Polanski’s work is up for discussion, the focus tends to fall mostly on the
films leading up to and including “Chinatown” as well as “The
Pianist,” the one that earned him his long-overdue Best Director Oscar,
with “Tess” too often falling by the wayside. In the last couple of
years or so, however, there has been a new and welcome focus on “Tess”
and its accomplishments. 2012 saw the debut of an extensive 4K restoration that
was justly acclaimed, and this week sees the Blu-ray debut of that version via
the Criterion Collection in an extensively detailed set that also includes a
2006 retrospective documentary, archival interviews with Polanski and key
members of the cast and crew and a second documentary on its production
produced for French television during its filming. The end result is a
beautiful package—one that will almost certainly
go down as one of the best Blu-ray’s of the still-young year—that will hopefully help to cement the film as both
Polanski’s crowning achievement to date and one of the great literary
adaptations in screen history.
“Tess”
tells the story of an ordinary peasant woman whose presumably simple and
uneventful life is utterly destroyed because of nothing more than a chance
encounter between two other people. Set in a rural area of Dorset, the story
begins as village drunk John Durbeyfield is walking home when he crosses paths
with a pastor who insists on calling him “Sir John.” The reason for
this, the pastor reveals, is that while pursuing his hobby of studying local
family trees, he discovered that the Durbeyfields are descendants of the noble
d’Urberville family. Elated beyond reason, Durbeyfield races home to share the
news with his family and a plan is hatched—they will send their beautiful
daughter Tess (Nastassja Kinski) off to visit a nearby branch of their hitherto
unknown relations as a way of introduction and, hopefully, to secure some
portion of their wealth.
Needless
to say, this plan goes sour almost instantly. For starters, it turns out that
this d’Urberville branch is not an authentic relation—they actually purchased the title a few generations
earlier. After she makes the acquaintance of family heir and pseudo-cousin Alec
(Leigh Lawson), he becomes instantly besotted with her and, in one of the great
seduction scenes, attempts to win her over with the help of an especially juicy
strawberry. She rebuffs his constant advances but one night, he forces himself
upon her and she becomes pregnant as a result. Tess flees, despite Alec’s
marriage proposal, and eventually gives birth. But the child dies soon after,
leaving her alone and no longer marriage material in the eyes of polite
society. Now a near-penniless laborer, she meet Angel Clare (Peter Firth), a
parson’s son who not only falls instantly in love with her but idealizes her as
pure and virtuous beyond measure and soon proposes marriage.
Tess
tries to admit her checkered past to Angel on several occasions but a
combination of his unwillingness to hear what she is saying and the whims of
fate ensures that he does not learn of her sexual past or her dead child until
their wedding night. Despite having a past indiscretion of his own, Angel is
hypocritically appalled by the revelation and abandons Tess right then and
there. She goes back to her family and after a few years, she finally decides
to take Alec up on his still-standing proposal, if only to provide some kind of
security for them. It is an unhappy marriage but when a now-contrite Angel
arrives in order to beg forgiveness for his behavior, she tearfully sends him
away. When Alec cruelly mocks her emotional response to Angel’s arrival, she
finally takes a stand with fatal results.
The
problem with a lot of screen adaptations of classic literary properties is that
too many of them fail to figure out a way of translating the material into
cinematic terms. They can replicate the dialogue and the sets and the costumes
easily enough, but unless they figure out how to convey the author’s voice in a
visually and dramatically interesting manner as well, all that the filmmakers
have in the end for their efforts is little more than an elaborate book report
that knows the words but not the music.
For
Polanski, “Tess” was a deeply personal endeavor dating back to 1969,
when Sharon Tate had given him a copy of the book, her favorite, a few months
before her death, and he promised to one day make it into a film for her. (The
film bears the heartbreakingly simple dedication “For Sharon.”) Over
the subsequent decade from that point until production commenced, he clearly
worked hard to figure out how to put it up in a way that retained Hardy’s voice
while still making it his own. He and co-screenwriters Gerard Brach and John
Brownjohn succeeded magnificently in this regard. Instead of rushing from
incident to incident, as is often the case with adaptations as filmmakers try
to cram in as many key points as a commercially viable running time will allow,
Polanski allows scenes to develop at their own pace and places just as much of
a premium on the silences as on the words. (The pause before Angel reacts to
Tess’s confession of her past is so painful to bear that we cannot help but
feel exactly what she is going through at that exact moment.) During the moments in which the film strays
from the book, most obviously in its denouement, the results fit in so
perfectly with their surroundings and seem so obvious and inevitable that one
wonders why Hardy didn’t come up with them in the first place.
Most
significantly, “Tess” is of a piece with much of Polanski’s
filmography because this is a film about a woman who is cruelly victimized by
the world around her but who is unwilling to simply become a victim. Many of
his more notable films have centered on such characters—”Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby,”
“Chinatown,” “Death and the Maiden”—and there is something about this type that he clearly
sympathizes with. He is unable to simply depict them as mere victims. Even when
the fates are against them, and that is certainly the case with Tess, he
admires the strength they summon to carry on—even as Tess is being led away
to her eventual meeting with the gallows in the finale, the image is one of
resilience and not of weakness and despair. Because of this, some have read
“Tess” as a sort of cinematic mea culpa for his own transgressions
and while I can understand how some could look at it in such a light, doing so
strikes me as an absurd simplification of both a complex incident and a complex
story.
Beyond
Polanski’s efforts, the most significant element to the success of
“Tess” is the stunning performance by Nastassja Kinski in the lead.
As a sixteen-year-old German girl with only a couple of minor credits who was
best known for being the daughter of wild man Klaus Kinski and Polanski’s
lover, few might have expected much from her but she more than delivered with a
performance that made her an international sensation. Of course, part of that
was due to her extraordinary physical presence—I am still convinced that she
is the single most beautiful woman to ever step in front of a movie camera—but what she does here is more than just an extended
modeling job. As Tess moves from incident to incident, Kinski finds just the
right note each time out and after a while, she simply becomes the character to
such a degree that the film almost takes on a documentary-like feel. (Even her
occasionally dodgy British accent winds up working for her in the sense that it
helps to underscore that Tess, no matter how she tries, will always be a bit of
an outsider in this world.) This is stunning work throughout and it makes one
wish that someone would once again give Kinski, whose career would eventually
run the gamut from fascinating box-office flops like “One from the
Heart,” the remake of “Cat People” and “The Moon in the
Gutter” to direct-to-video junk and European productions that would never
make it across the pond, the kind of meaty role that would allow her to shine
as she does here. (One that did was Michael Winterbottom’s underrated 2000 film
“The Claim,” itself based on another Thomas Hardy novel,
coincidentally enough).
Impeccably
directed, beautifully performed and visually ravishing (original
cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth died a couple of weeks into filming and was
replaced by Ghislain Cloquet—both would subsequently win
the Best Cinematography Oscar), “Tess” was a masterpiece the moment
it was released, and, as a new viewing of the Blu-ray will confirm, this is a position that
has only strengthened in the ensuing years. For those who have seen it before,
looking at it again will be akin to once again dipping into a favorite book and
finding that it has grown in richness and resonance since that initial
encounter. For those who have never experienced it before, be prepared for a
truly unforgettable cinematic experience.
