Frantic

Speaking of Hitchcock, I'll tell you one thing: Roman Polanski may be a child molester and all that, but he is one hell of a director. He is great. His serpentine, paranoid camera work here does more to project an atmosphere of dread and suspicion than anything the camera actually sees. Polanski is very DePalma-esque in this regard (or maybe DePalma is very Polanski-esque. I don't know). Harrison Ford is excellent as an American trying to find his abducted wife in a suddenly threatening Paris. He perfectly captures the mixture of fury, fear, and frustration you would expect. The city itself is photographed to wonderful effect. The comparisons to Hitchcock were probably inevitable, but I certainly do not find them out of line; the film is less derivative than it is an updating. The first half of the film is an absolute knockout, even though (or maybe because) we don't quite know what's going on. But unlike a lot of films in which you don't know what's going on, you don't feel left behind here; we are on a journey of discovery along WITH the filmmakers, and I think that that is what makes this so accessible. The plot (when we figure it out) is not so farfetched as to be ludicrous; you needn't expend all your energy suspending disbelief.

The problem comes in the second half, when the film begins to lose its edge. This may be an inevitable problem of the genre. Once the pieces start to come together, once the principles emerge from the shadows, you can't help but lose some of the intrigue and suspense. Part of the thrill of a movie like this done well is the delicious sense of NOT knowing what is happening or what is going to happen next. Once these things are revealed, they cannot help but be a bit of an anti-climax (either that or they just get unbelievable, which may be worse). The only way around this is probably to have things unravel in a lightning conclusion near the end of the film (i.e. “Dressed to Kill”) rather than have the resolution extend over the entire second half. That way the sheer exhilaration of the action compensates for the lack of suspense. At some point all these pictures come down to conflict between good guys and bad guys, but as soon as things are this concrete, the clock starts to tick. But this is small criticism of a film that is definitely worth seeing. Taut and atmospheric, it is handled with high style and great skill by people who really know what they are doing.