Pride, Sacrifice and Ambiguous Victories in Knife in the Water (1962)

Alicia Chmielewski
1-17-07


Roman Polanski, Knife in the Water (1962)

Released just five years after Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1957), Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962) wades through psychological rather than political territory – quite a departure from the focus of his contemporaries. Polanski’s three sailboat passengers speak through silences and weigh their worth against one another as if to pose the question to us of whether it is more favorable to be well off in society but cut off emotionally and restricted from enjoying the natural leisurely joys, or a lowly student hitchhiker who is able to tune into nature without the use of scientific tools and to see possibilities in the moment rather than the distant future. This premise immediately invites viewers to question what is behind the close-ups, isolated locale and tense moments that dominate Polanski's unconventional film. If Polanski is simply working within the censorship codes to comment abstractly on the problem of class division under communist rule, then Krystyna’s statement to the young hitchhiker that he is just like Andrzej does not quite fit. Polanski is getting at more than the politically problematic difference between class.

If we couple class with age and gender, however, we may begin to see a different sort of message or interpretation emerging. There are no clear cut answers here and all of our musings for meaning are further disturbed by the ending, which, as we have discussed in class, does not seem to satisfy our desire for some definite outcome or sense made of the constant, building tension throughout.

The film begins in silence. We see trees reflected in the windshield of a car; faces peeking out, obscured by shadows. As the sequence continues we notice that it is a man and a woman, we assume they are a couple yet the only sign of such a relationship comes when they switch drivers and the man leans over to kiss the woman’s neck. Soon, there is some sound, but it comes from the radio rather than either of the two sitting rigidly beside one another. Soon, this completely tense and monotonous scene is transformed as a hitchhiker appears in the road. The man insists that he will move and does not begin to brake until the last possible moment, but by eventually doing so, he has become complicit in his role promoting existential crisis and his eventual psychological undoing. From this point on, the competition between the older man driving and the younger hitchhiker at his mercy continues to escalate until the climax of the film during which the politics of power relationships and gender are turned upside down. An yet, at the film’s close, we wonder, who has really gotten the upper hand? Was it the wife, Krystyna, prize and punishment to both men who compete for, yet never find a lasting bond with her? The young hitchhiker who jumps back into his wandering life after a slight diversion? Or was it the husband, Andrzej, who ironically emulates the character of his story, burned by hot coals because he became too overconfident?

Much relies on a decision yet to come as we depart from the characters. Andrzej must decide whether he will go to the police and confess to having a part in the young hitchhiker’s death or if he will simply go home. Krystyna assures him that the young man is still alive and that she has even had an affair with him, yet Andrzej’s reaction is one of disbelief as he chooses to believe that she has constructed this lie in order to save him from turning himself in. In this way, Krystyna is able to escape responsibility for her affair while remaining honest with her husband. One has to question whether Andrzej is constructing his own version of events to shield himself from the possibility that Krystyna is in fact telling the truth. If this is the case, however, his masculine pride is the source of his psychological undoing because he must believe his version of events – that he was physically superior to the younger man, who could not swim to save his own life after he falls into the water, desperately attempting to retrieve the knife, an action symbolic of his quest to attain superior masculinity, which is never quite fulfilled no matter how many times he chases after it. So, if Andrzej is superior, than he is also a murderer.

One of the most fascinating plot elements within Knife in the Water is that Andrzej directly plays a part in every event that leads up to his final psychological turmoil. He invites the young man aboard to prove to his wife that he is inferior; he makes it easy for Krystyna and the young man to share their talents in a romantic sort of way as they share songs and poetry while he withdraws, listening to the radio during the storm that forces them below deck; he envies the younger man and steals his knife, taking the only possession of value to him and carelessly letting it fall into the water; after the hitchhiker is presumed dead, he calls his wife a whore and jumps ship, swimming to shore and leaving the perfect opportunity for his wife to have the affair; and he would rather cut his feet on the glass, metaphorically as per his story, admitting his guilt for the young man’s disappearance, than to admit that he may have lost the competition after all. In many ways, the young man may have come to show the older man the way to living life with more of an authentic confidence in one’s own masculinity, but it was up to Andrzej to learn from the experience. The verdict on that is still out. And herein lies a possible interpretation of Christ like symbolism with respect to the young man: Christ came to lead the way and return man to his natural state, yet his own people ultimately reject him and sacrifice him to their own jealousies, prides and disbelief. Similarly, the young man is able to win the sexuality of Andrzej’s wife, proving that he was the sexually superior man. He has come to show the way by demonstrating his knowledge of the nature of things over technology and the creative instinct needed to maintain Krystyna’s attention. Yet Andrzej internally sacrifices him, favoring the thought of him dead rather than believing in his value, and then returns to his daily routine of silence and cold coexistence with Krystyna, showing no sign one way or the other that he has learned anything.