A wonderful welcome special sidebar at 2006’s 44th New York Film Festival (September 29-October 15), and actually running longer (September 30-October 26), is Lincoln Center’s “50 Years of Janus Films,” which included a screening of Knife in the Water. Wonderful and welcome, too, was the surprise Q&A with three founders and directors of that pioneering distributor and its “overlapping” Criterion laser disc and DVD partner, for now classic foreign films in this country. In new or pristine 35 mm prints, the thirty-one features and one integrally related short are nothing less than a staggering compilation of what’s-what and who’s-who of legendary titles, filmmakers and actors, “the fixed canon of film” plus others “overshadowed by that canon,” e.g., Bergman’s pre-Seventh Seal Monika. With fewer barriers to overseas films thanks to a technological sea change in viewing possibilities, commented Criterion’s Peter Becker, there is today a stronger sense of mission not only to identify and preserve, but to widen “film literacy” in a world where so much is available.

The second film screened for press and industry but the first from the sidebar is Knife in the Water/Nóż w wodzie aka The Young Lover and The Long Sunday. This 1962 Venice critics’ choice and Oscar nominee launched twenty-nine-year-old director/co-screenwriter Roman Polański onto the international stage. In Polish, the film is generally less known than the director’s infamous private life and less seen than later efforts in French and, from the mid-’60s on, English -- Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, Dance of the Vampires/The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, Tess, The Pianist and relative flops Pirates and Frantic. Yet, mirroring the early emotional scars of the Jewish filmmaker born in Paris but brought back to Kraków by his Polish parents in 1936, his first feature seeds the preoccupations that mark the subsequent work: obsession, fear and alienation; violence, aberration, sexual humiliation and gamesmanship. Reportedly another Hitchcock in pushing actors, particularly actresses, beyond the breaking point -- while drawing previously unsuspected talent from Deneuve and Mia Farrow -- Polański strips bare the nature of human dealings and the will to dominate.

Events after the close will depend on an underlined final choice: husband Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) waits long in the couple’s idling imported luxury automobile, his turning to right or left at a junction not recorded. Beyond this trick, however, is what matters, the reversal in twenty-four hours within a relationship. Knowing that her confession of the truth is disbelieved, wife Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka) smiles ever so slightly in the passenger seat, for she is now in the driver’s seat.

In sunshine, wind or pounding rain, crisp black and white further enhances a vision so naked that, aside from three protagonists, raucous seabirds and a prizefight announcer’s radio voice, no other living being is seen or heard. On a day’s getaway, the prosperous thirtyish couple are semi-trapped into ungraciously picking up a university-student hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz), they in white and dark-haired, he blond in dark clothing. Small hints are dropped and accumulate from the beginning, as in Andrzej’s insistence that, had his less capable spouse been at the wheel, the young man -- who ignores a request for his name -- would be dead.

The new addition prefers walking, has no knowledge of sailing and professes to be a non-swimmer but is taken aboard the sailboat, perhaps for the husband to show off. “Games,” mental as well as jackstraws (pick-up-sticks), becomes a frequent reference, as, due to a sudden squall and disabled halyard, seemingly naïve passenger, pipe-smoking husband and voluptuous and (possibly) resentful wife spend more time than reckoned cramped aboard. Essential, he responds, for rucksack traveling, the newcomer’s outsized spring-knife is an obvious symbol, played with and thrown only by the men, as is their tow-path African Queen-pulling the boat, but the undercurrent of danger is developed largely through terse barbed dialogue.

With variations, the situation itself is a tried-and-true one, that of an outsider entering an established order which is thereby threatened, so the intruder must be expelled or assimilated, and the original group’s dynamics are altered. The purely physical violence one expects from such raw ego confrontation, however, is not what one gets. Dismissing what at first appears superficially easy, Knife in the Water goes beneath that surface, to twist the knife. A play on its director’s first, experimental quarter-hour documentary title of Two Men and a Wardrobe, this “Two Men and a Woman in a Boat” is “a great way,” as Jeanne Berney’s introductory remarks about “our marketing effort” had it, “for kids to fall in love with movies, the way we did.” 

(Released by Criterion Collection; not rated by MPAA.)