Bitter Moon

Although the material has a lot more going for it than Polanksi’s previous effort, the misfire that was Frantic (1988), Bitter Moon carries over many of the problems of its predecessor. It’s overlong, excessively padded out with pop-tuned party scenes (although a lesbian number between Emmanuelle Seigner and Kristin Scott Thomas to the strains of Roxy Music’s “Slave To Love” is a keeper) and features far too much of Seigner who was by this time married to Polanski but who is nowhere near as appealing as he apparently imagines her to be.

Scott Thomas and Hugh Grant play a buttoned-up  English couple, Fiona and Nigel, on a Black Sea cruise who meet Oscar (Peter Coyote) and his wife, Mimi (Seigner). Nigel immediately gets the hots for the provocatively-attired Mimi but the wheel-chair-bound Oscar insists on telling him the cautionary tale of their rocky romance, which we see in the extended flashbacks that constitute the bulk of the film.

Based on a novel by Pascal Bruckner and adapted by Polanski, Gérard Brach and John Brownjohn, Bitter Moon is a literary sadomasochistic romance that might have been deliciously sexy on the page but which, somewhat surprisingly, is anything but in Polanski’s hands. Garbing her in much the same slutty wardrobe she had in Frantic, Polanski gets his wife to play the sex kitten but his DOP, Tonino Delli Colli, is unable to mollify her unsexy awkwardness, through no fault of his own particularly given the frequency with which her husband has her display her naked and ample backside. If Seigner is physically wrong for the part of a nymphet, she is also unable to suggest the erotic allure (except briefly early in the film when she looks remarkably like Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, 1979) which supposedly drove Oscar to his doom.  All of which means that none of the original text’s tale of  mutually-devouring sexual obsession, parlayed  with relish by Coyote’s over-heated narration, is apparent on the screen. Indeed, at times it look quite ridiculous, the scene in which Seigner dresses as a dominatrix and whips Coyote in a pig mask while a tape plays farmyard noises being the low point of their shenanigans. Why Nigel's lust for Mimi is unabated by Oscar's detumescent relating of his decline and fall is a mystery.

Had the film been set in the 1930s when well-to-do people actually took cruises, and the on-board confinement  resonated with the inward-looking confinement of the kinky folie à deux this might have been Polanski’s Last Tango In Paris (1972) but he shows the same lack of directorial commitment that he did with Frantic. One feels that he’d rather have been playing the sex games with Ms Seigner rather than making a film about such antics. For everyone’s sake it would have been better if he had.

 

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