Dir.
Roman Polanski, 1966, UK, 112 mins
Cast:
Donald Pleasence, Françoise Dorléac, Lionel Standler, Jack MacGowran
Like his earlier Knife In The Water, a tense psychological thriller in which a stranger exposes the deep-rooted cracks in the marriage of a well-to-do couple, Roman Polanski's Cul-de-sac is a subtle exploration of shifting power in a mismatched threesome. Like the earlier film, it is set in a single, claustrophobic space; the incompatibility of the characters at close quarters results in a black comedy of class and gender struggle.
Dickie (Stadler) and Albert (MacGowran), a couple of hapless criminals on the run, find themselves stranded on a beach in Northumberland when their clapped-out getaway vehicle runs out of petrol. Leaving the wounded Albert in the car, Dickie comes upon an 11th-century castle on the headland where he telephones for help and takes hostage its occupants, the foppish George (Pleasence) and his young French wife, Teresa (Dorléac). While waiting for assistance to arrive, husband, wife and stranger battle it out for control of the situation in a series of absurd power games. At first Dickie is in charge, ordering George and Teresa to push the beached car up to the castle and, when Albert dies, to dig his grave. However, when George's stuck-up friends pay an unexpected visit, Dickie is introduced as James, the butler, and is ordered to cook dinner ("I'm not gonna kill no chicken", replies the gravel-voiced hoodlum). Teresa, who is clearly unfulfilled by her marriage to the unmanly George, openly flirts with one of his visitors. George confronts his opinionated friends who think that he has gone "completely off his rocker since he met that tart" and proudly orders them to get out of his "fortress". As George grows in stature, not only is considerable damage done to his beloved property, but he also loses his friends, his car and ultimately his wife.
Polanski revels in the absurdity of the characters and their situation. George is a myopic wimp who lost his first wife and is constantly cuckolded by his second ("she's a naughty little girl - I worship her, I'm crazy about her"). Dickie is a boorish American who does his best to pretend he's in a hardened gangster movie but is somewhat out-of-his depth in this gentle comedy of manners: the English middle classes perplex him ("you've got to be out of your skull to live in a place like this"). Teresa, a lusty French gamine who cavorts in the sand-dunes with the neighbour's son, is quite uninhibited about removing all her clothes in front of Dickie and enjoys seeing her pansy of a husband mincing in her nightdress and lipstick. Clearly, she would much prefer to be running amok in a sexy Nouvelle Vague movie than shut up in this miserable English castle, tittle-tattling with her husband's dreary, vacuous friends. Even the jazzy, vibes-and-bongos score feels like it is straight out of À Bout de Souffle . Add to this brilliant hotchpotch more chickens than anyone should humanly endure, plus George's endless playing of his favourite scratched LP of stylophone music - and you have some idea of the dead-end world of Cul-de-sac.
The priceless humour is brilliantly underplayed by the actors such that the viewer must be prepared to look beneath the surface. For example, there is a very good reason why Teresa and the neighbour's daily shrimping excursions seem to yield very few shrimps; it doesn't take much imagination to figure out that it's not the shrimps they are after. This film owes much to Absurdist Theatre, in particular plays like Waiting for Godot and The Birthday Party with which it has much in common: George and Dickie play much the same futile waiting game as Vladimir and Estragon, and there is more than a touch of Pinter's Goldberg and McCann in Polanski's gansters. Polanski maintains a tangible but subtextual tension throughout, particularly in the long theatrical shots (like the famous 9 minute sequence on the beach) and the extensive use of carefully timed sound effects (lots of chirping, hooting, crowing and clucking).
Cul-de-sac is Polanski's funniest film and also his most subtly realised. It may not appeal to fans of his gothic horror movies, but it is a must for anyone who appreciates the absurdity of life. And chickens.
Simon Gray
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