"Dead End" was filmed in 1966 and was Polanski's second film after leaving Poland. At that time, he was already famous for "Water Knife", but he was far from going to Hollywood to venture and filmed "Ross" that made him famous. Mary's Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974) have a short sequence. It's hard to say exactly what place this almost overlooked Dead End had in Polanski's career, let's just say it's an indescribable film, even if you're already familiar with Polanski's absurd humiliation of humanity Views of the situation, his perverse gender-political stances or his rambling sarcastic tone, Dead End will still leave you surprised and clueless.
The story takes place in the desolate north of England, where a rough robber, a cowardly husband and his frivolous wife spend 24 hours in a dilapidated castle. No director can coax audiences while defying their expectations quite like Polanski. "Dead End" isn't some kind of "threesome" erotica or "invader vs. middle-class" horror movie, it's a little SM but has the wrong target. In short, Polanski has created a quirky real but highly abstract world in the film, which is a "shameless" mix of thriller, horror, and comedy, but ultimately does not belong to any of them.
At the beginning of the film, the camera follows a car moving on a desolate beach, and two hapless robbers fail to commit the crime, steal the car and flee, but are stuck on the road. One of them, Dickie, decided to go to the castle in front of him and call for help. But the real oddities in the story are the couple who live here, George, a bald, pedantic English man, and Theresa, his young, capricious French wife. It is conceivable that ruthless robbers intervened in this unequal marriage (George was half-coerced into women's pajamas, red lips and eyeliner by Tereza as soon as she appeared, and Tereza was still with neighbors. cheating) - Apparently, Tereza is the "controller". George is timid but admires Dickie's savage masculinity; Tereza is a cat-like non-dangerous flirt, testing her own sexual attraction or hoping to regain control over a man (or George, for that matter). The constant conflict between the hostages and the robbers and the weird reconciliation, in the end, George killed Dickie and went into a madness...
Popular in the 50s, this absurdist art work about the loss of control of human existence, such as Samuel • Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, but most of these works are more tragic than comedy, each dialogue is a philosophical debate, and humans seem to recognize that they are trapped in an uncontrolled situation. Not so with Polanski's Dead End, a film that explores humiliation, role-playing and betrayal, the endless and inexplicable anxieties of humankind, and a pervasive black humor that has never been seen on the big screen.
According to British critic Kenneth Tynan, who worked with Polanski on Macbeth, Polanski has always been drawn to the subject of one man trying to control and manipulate others, starting with his debut, "Water Knife." Through his clever choreography—wacky music and rambunctious photography—he instills a sense of tension between the characters in isolation, as if Polanski put a basket of ingredients in an inappropriate analogy. pot, stirring until they are charred, thus achieving what Hitchcock called "pure film". On the other hand, although Polanski is reluctant to admit that "Dead End" has a connection with his personal life, it cannot stop the audience from conjecturing that, for example, some researchers say that the prototype of Tereza, who has a strong desire for control, is Polanski His first wife, Polish actress Basia Kwiatkowska.
However, "Dead End" did not gain much recognition from the critics, and the film received accusations of "necrophilia, homosexuality, SM" and the like in the United States. And Polanski replied that it was the American question, "I'm not obsessed with that, Dead End is just a movie."
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