Roman Polanski - Bitter Moon (1992)

The film begins with the camera focused on the sea and the waves, and the music with the piano playing to good effect, then an increasingly enlarging zooming shot of a porthole. Then to the cruise liner where the four main characters are based. It is a story narrated and told by Oscar, played by Peter Coyote, who is wheelchair-bound, to Nigel, played by Hugh Grant, a man he meets on the cruise. Nigel is intrigued by an entwining and serpentine tale Oscar tells him, and so are we, and even though it starts to sound incredulous, he has to return to Oscar's quarters to hear more. The tale is so engrossing because it concerns Oscar's beautiful, sultry and seductive wife, Mimi, played mesmerisingly by Emmanuelle Seigner. Oscar is entranced at first with her and delves into all kinds of sexual games, then his passion for her begins to subside and he rejects her and leaves her alone on a plane. All the while Nigel's wife (Kristin Scott-Thomas) is becoming disillusioned with Nigel's fascination with Mimi and Oscar.


Critics and public alike always make the same mistake of judging the film by it's director's life and not solely on content alone. If you separate Polanski's turbulent, and frequently tragic life from this material, you'll see that this is a piece of work by an intelligent, honest, humanistic storyteller at the peak of his creative powers and not a sick joke by a pervert. This is a powerful film about love, and to view it as a sort of a soft-core, titillation exercise by Polanski is to miss the point of the film. The up-front sexuality of the film is there not to merely provoke a cheap arousal from the viewer. The film's frankness is used to point out how empty and hollow the couple's relationship really is, and how far people are willing to go in order to save love that was never really there to begin with. Make no mistake, this is a mature and meticulously constructed work that is no less focused than Polanski's well-respected masterpieces like Rosemarie's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist.