Dir.
Roman Polanski, 1988, USA/France, 120 mins
Cast:
Harrison Ford, Betty Buckley, John Mahoney, Jimmie Ray Weeks, Yorgo Voyagis, David Huddleston, Emmanuelle Seigner
As well as being only one of two Polanski films from the 1980s (the other being Pirates in 1986), Frantic is also noteworthy for Harrison Ford's performance as Dr Richard Walker, coming from a time when Ford was pursuing atypical, unheroic roles, such as the obsessive-destructive father in Peter Weir's The Mosquito Coast.
Frantic begins with Walker and his wife Sondra (Buckley) arriving in Paris for on a business trip. Whilst Walker takes a shower in their hotel room, his wife receives a telephone call and leaves the room. When Walker finishes showering, he finds that his wife has mysteriously vanished. At first Walker thinks she has simply left the hotel for a moment, but he soon has to cope with the growing realisation that his wife may have been kidnapped. Stranded in Paris and unable to speak French (unlike his wife, who was fluent), Walker struggles to find out what has happened. He uncovers cryptic clues from the citizens of Paris and encounters bureaucratic obstacles from the American Embassy. Eventually, he teams up with Michelle (Seigner), who may hold the key to his wife's fate.
Although Walker takes on the heroic mantle that we expect from a star like Harrison Ford, he is hardly a Han Solo/Indiana Jones figure. We watch Walker as he's cut adrift in a Paris unseen by tourists like himself; a mysterious, threatening, almost alien environment. The clear influence on this film is Alfred Hitchcock, with the suspenseful rooftop sequences echoing North by Northwest , a film, like many of Hitchcock's thrillers, that also features an ordinary protagonist who is thrust into an extraordinary situation. However, Frantic also echoes other Polanski films like Repulsion, which chronicled the mental disintegration of a young French woman (Catherine Deneuve) who felt trapped in a city (London) where she felt out of place, and The Pianist, which featured Adrien Brody's pianist adrift in a hostile world (war-torn Warsaw) who has to survive on his wits. Walker isn't trapped in the middle of a war and doesn't have a mental breakdown, but his patience and endurance are pushed to the limit.
From the opening scene, when a taxi taking Walker and Sondra to their hotel gets a flat tyre (and Walker cannot communicate with the French-speaking driver), we get a sense that the couple's visit to Paris is not going to be a smooth ride. Ford and Buckley expertly encapsulate this couple's marriage in only a few minutes of screen time during the opening moments, with the early hotel room scenes expertly filmed in long takes by Polanski. These extended shots allow the actors to perform uninterrupted, making their behaviour and relationship seem more natural.
When Walker's wife disappears, the events in the film are seen almost exclusively through Ford's eyes. By keeping strictly to the Doctor's point of view, Polanski heightens our identification with Walker, and we only visit locations, meet characters and discover information when he does. Polanski's best thriller is undoubtedly Chinatown, but Frantic is a film that has curiously been overlooked and underappreciated in the careers of both its director and leading man, and is surely due for a reappraisal.
Martyn Bamber
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