Films: 1960s
(1968) Rosemary's Baby
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Rosemary's Baby
Director: Roman Polanski
Release: 1968
Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" is at once a supremely effective thriller and an insidiously unsettling horror film. Polanski weaves paranoia into the occult, the resulting fabric is a thoroughly modern film that invades the urban setting - the apartment, the doctor's office, the busy sidewalk.
Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse (John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow) move into a gorgeous and spacious apartment in midtown Manhattan. She's trying to get pregnant and he's trying to get hired on Broadway. Following a suicide in the building, they meet a nosey and elderly next-door couple, Minnie and Roman Castavet (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer) and life changes.
Rosemary gets pregnant and Guy gets hired, but the circumstances are bizarre. Rosemary's conception night is plagued by nightmares of demonic rape and Guy's break comes in the form of the unexplained blinding of his competition. Rosemary is swept into an increasing narrow channel arranged by Guy, Roman and Minnie - it is their doctor, their vitamins and no outsiders.
Rosemary begins to suspect foul play when her pregnancy produces unending abdominal pain, and as Rosemary searches for her old life and the outside world, a gradual realization that a horrific plot may be underway becomes her increasingly terrifying reality.
Polanski's script sets his characters in motion with an unflinching knack for psychological games. His camera moves through the apartments and hallways of the Bramford with a tentativeness that emulates the naiveté and willing obtuseness of Rosemary herself. It peeks into rooms, it sees the truth of Guy's ambition and his hollow promises, it perceives the blatant wrongness of the Castavets, but it allows the action to continue unchecked.
In the process, Polanski creates a masterpiece of unease. We catch Guy in the middle of something secret with Roman. They notice us and stop. Dream floods the room with unexpected ease and completeness; suddenly Rosemary is adrift on her bed in an ocean, or surrounded by nuns and schoolgirls in a twisted version of her building.
"Rosemary's Baby" uncorks the Dom Perignon of biological misgivings. Pregnancy is not only mysterious, it is ominous. Rosemary seems to be consumed from the inside from the moment her questionable impregnation takes root. She physically shrivels and Polanski sees to it that makeup and lighting remove any vestige of health from her cheeks and face. Her ribs poke through her dress. It's the ultimate nightmare pregnancy, to be host to an inscrutable and unforgiving something.
Meanwhile, Cassavetes creates the ultimate untrustworthy spouse. His version of husband is expertly balanced between adolescent selfishness and fumbling manhood. The impression is that Guy (who's name is literally the least descriptive noun for "man"), has never confronted his own limitations. The escape route his elderly neighbors provide is a continuation of that avoidance. His rehearsals in the apartment do not speak of any great thespian talent, and his hand-delivered fame results in grotesque self-involvment rather than comfort or personal achievement.
Polanski is careful not to let Cassavetes veer to close to evil, however. He pouts and worries and fusses like a child, aware that he has done something wrong but unable to admit to, never mind correct, his mistake.
"Rosemary's Baby" confronts evil in a morally relativistic fashion. It hurtles Rosemary into a bargain from which she cannot emerge the wealthier. Her life, prior to her unfortunate pregnancy, is apparently directionless - except for her marriage. There is no indication that she has career goals, or hobbies or passions of any kind. She and Guy play Scrabble. She cooks for friends, who seem to form a sorority that Rosemary orbits but does not enter.
There is a great deal of talk about family in "Rosemary's Baby. There is no family evident, however, except for the possible coven next door. Neither Guy nor Rosemary ever mention fathers, mothers, brothers or sisters. Maurice Evans as their older friend "Hutch" is the only paternal figure in Rosemary's life, but she has never met his daughter or his lover.
This is the basic underpinning of Polanski's script, of his film: That we hardly know the people with whom we spend our days and that some of them have clear designs on the world that, should we enter them, will sweep us inexorably along a foreign and dangerous path.
"Rosemary's Baby" executes a slow motion ballet toward the edge of a stage, and when it finally pitches Farrow's morally disfigured and corrupted mother character into that orchestral pit, it raises a clamor that requires repeat visits to sort out. It rewards with an increasing sense of repulsion and fascination at each viewing.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Rosemary's Baby, 1968
'Rosemary's Baby' uncorks the Dom Perignon of biological misgivings. Pregnancy is not only mysterious, it is ominous. Rosemary seems to be consumed from the inside from the moment her questionable impregnation takes root. She physically shrivels and Polanski sees to it that makeup and lighting remove any vestige of health from her cheeks and face. Her ribs poke through her dress. It's the ultimate nightmare pregnancy, to be host to an inscrutable and unforgiving something.
