A snarkier person than I
could repurpose the title of this film as the entire content of the review,
since watching this obscure Roman Polanski comedy is a befuddling experience.
First comes the matter of the film’s obscurity. Any time I mention this picture
to a fellow cinefile, they’re surprised not only that Polanski made a feature
between Macbeth (1971) and Chinatown (1974), but that the feature
has all but disappeared from public view. Never released on home video in the
U.S., the film is mostly available via bootleg copies. Next comes the matter of
the movie itself. Although Polanski had made comedies previously, including The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967),
this isn’t some brisk cavalcade of jokes. Instead, What? is an epic-length surrealistic sex farce that was rated X during
its first American release. (Nothing pornographic happens, but every scene is
infused with carnality and/or nudity.) And finally there’s the matter of what
this film says about Polanski’s muse.
Much ink has been spilled theorizing that
the gore and violence of Polanski’s Macbeth
was an indirect response to the murder of the director’s pregnant wife, Sharon
Tate, by members of the Manson family. Similarly, one could draw troubling
connections between What?, during
which men take sexual liberties with an innocent young woman, and Polanski’s
subsequent problems stemming from a sexual encounter with an underage girl. If Macbeth tells us something about the
filmmaker’s anguish, does What? tell us something about the way he found release while processing grief? On a less
worrisome level, it’s also possible to read What?
as an homage to Tate, whose screen persona would have suited the
film’s leading role of an amiably ditzy sexpot. In any event, What? is too strange to take seriously,
and yet it’s not quite strange enough to qualify as some quintessentially ’70s
head trip. The vibe is pure debauchery.
Shot on the grounds of a beachside villa owned by the film’s
producer, Carlo Ponti, the semi-improvised film begins with American tourist
Nancy (Sydne Rome) catching a ride from a group of swarthy locals in a car.
They try to rape her, but she escapes and leaps onto an elevator lift that
takes her to the villa. There, she spends several days with a group of
sex-crazed weirdos, including ex-pimp Alex (Marcello Mastraoianni). Nancy ends
up naked frequently, so much of the film’s dialogue concerns evaluations of her
breasts and inquires into her sexual availability. Polanski plays a supporting
role as an oddball named Mosquito, who brags about his “big stinger.” (He’s
ostensibly referring to a spear gun, but you get the idea.) Like a dumb victim
in some bad horror movie, Nancy remains at the villa even though everyone there
is insane, and she falls into a twisted sexual relationship with Alex. In one
scene, he wears only the skin of a tiger he killed on a hunting trip, then
crawls on all fours while Nancy whips him until he’s sufficiently aroused for a
tryst. This stuff goes on forever,
since the version of What? that I
watched was two and a half hours long, even though most sources list the
running time as 110 minutes (presumably the length of some edit for the
American market).
What? is pointless
and prurient, but the really confounding thing about the picture is that it’s
made as well as any other peak-period Polanski film. The camerawork is smooth,
the editing is graceful, and some of the dialogue as droll. After Alex
complains about “the evil pestilence of this house,” Nancy replies, in her
breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, “You’re right—it does have a funny smell!” While
many other ’70s movies venture further into the bizarre than What?, few represent such a peculiar
chapter in the story of an internationally revered filmmaker at the height of
his creative power.
What?:
FREAKY
