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- Jul 26, 2008
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Try to see it from the perspective of a jew who spent his childhood in a Warsaw closet all surrounded by Nazis, which is probably the only perspective for all Polanski movies, and you'll know it was warranted all along.
Good point. They don't teach us about WWII in school over here, so I'm nowhere near as familiar with it as I should be, but weren't Jews in France a victim of Nazism similar to how Jewish Poles were? Wouldn't it have made more sense to set the movie in a German city rather than in Paris to emphasize the (arguably warranted) paranoia?
I also watched Eyes Without a Face today. I liked it a lot - it did some stuff that I'm shocked they got away with. I do have a minor complaint and a medium sized complaint though.
Spoiler:
The small one is... We're supposed to see the doctor as alternatingly sadistic and sympathetic, but it was hard to see him as sympathetic. There's a scene where he's treating a young boy where I think the audience is supposed to say "Aw, he's good with kids so he must have some good to him." But the actor looked stern, mean, not overly concerned about the kid. So to me it just came off as him being emotionally detached, which was a given at that point.
The medium one is... I've noticed that a lot of movies from the period end pretty abruptly, e.g., bad guy dies, good guy smiles, roll credits. There's no fallout or followup. I think it would've been better to actually see what the doctor's daughter experienced after the movie ended, possibly regretting what she'd done and realizing she now had no recourse, or really driving home the fact that her appearance was worse off now than before the surgery. Or, given that she was begging her caretaker to kill her, if she stared into a mirror for a long time, smashed it, and slit her throat with a shard.
One other thing is that there wasn't a whole lot of extra content on the Criterion release. I was looking forward to rewatching it with an analysis dubbed in, which is the case with all the other Criterion movies I have.
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