Bitter Moon

A disturbing, spare story and a return to Polanski's earlier thematic grounds; it's not Knife in the Water, but it does feature fragmenting marriages and a big boat. Nigel and Fiona (Grant and Scott-Thomas) are a prosaic British couple, steaming their way to India on a romantic second-honeymoon cruise. One night after a tiff with his wife, Nigel happens upon a beautiful young woman (Seigner) in the shipboard nightclub. Soon after, he is approached by a haggard man in a wheelchair who introduces himself as Oscar (Coyote) and tells him that the woman, Mimi, is his wife. Sensing Nigel's sudden infatuation with Mimi, Oscar tells the sputtering Brit that he can have her, if he's willing to lend an ear to the tale of their marriage and what went wrong. Here, through a series of flashbacks, Polanski relates the story of Oscar and Mimi's obsessive love, from their sudden, chance meeting aboard a Parisian bus to their descent into the outré limits of sexuality and combatant romance. Disgusted by Oscar's frank recounting of their colorful sex life, the twittish, mannered Nigel nevertheless finds the story mesmerizing; he begins to realize, perhaps for the first time, that there may be more to a marriage than the passionless trap he currently finds himself in. Polanski's latest is a dark, vicious little film; simultaneously hilarious and upsetting, its claustrophobic sense is only heightened by the director's use of tiny shipboard cabins and dark, shadowed lighting. The characterizations here are all top-notch, from Grant's seriocomic turn as the archetypal repressed Brit to Seigner's (Polanski's real-life wife) pouting sex bomb to Coyote's leering, shattered hack. It's a grim, resonant (and rather longish, at 139 minutes) story that hearkens back to the days of Repulsion and Cul-De-Sac, ignoring more recent backfires such as Frantic and Pirates.