Hail Rosemary

Rating: Null/10 (4 October 1999)

You can see what attracted Polanski to this script. It recalls his earlier Repulsion - the apartment which becomes a prison, the gradual disintegration of the young woman who inhabits it, even the increasingly unpalatable contents of the fridge. In formal terms, Rosemary's Baby is a gleefully blasphemous parody of the Life of the Virgin (whose name, of course, is entangled in Rosemary's own) - right down to a travestied Adoration of the Magi in the devastating closing scene, in which one of the wise men from the East appears as a Japanese tourist with a Pentax. But this blackest of comedies everywhere bears the imprint of Polanski's nightmarish fugitive childhood in the Poland of the Holocaust. Betrayal awaits at every turn; prying neighbours mean only harm; the uncomprehending and incomprehensible normality of the outside world seems the cruellest taunt. The evocation of evil is all the more chilling for its hilarious banality - the coven of old dears next door are as devoted to knitting and soft furnishings as to the Prince of Darkness. And at the film's heart, beyond the mockery, is Mia Farrow's harrowing transformation from Mary Quant mannequin to a gaunt and suffering spectre from the concentration camps, shorn and hollow-eyed - as if the film were haunted by the memory of the director's own mother, murdered at Auschwitz. Polanski coaxes a performance of aching vulnerability from Farrow as the not-so-bright child bride impregnated by a distinctly unholy ghost in hubby's Faustian pact - as pure in her simple, dogged saintliness as Bresson's Joan of Arc.
Incidentally, the most telling shot in the film - Minnie Castevets glimpsed through the bedroom doorway as she phones Bad Obstetrician, our view disconcertingly half-obstructed by the door-jamb in the foreground - is one that Polanski used again, and to the same troubling effect, some 20 years later in the opening scene of Frantic.