Product: Rosemary's Baby (El Bebe de Rosemary) [ NON-USA FORMAT, NTSC, Reg.4 Import - Latin America ] (1968)
Rating: 5.0
The best buy of the month.
Yesterday I took home two of this month's DVD offerings - American Beauty and the film I review here. I still like the 5-time Oscar winner immensely, but the self-congratulatory cover of the "Awards Edition" is dripping with hype - I plan to store the disc in a plain envelope instead.So Rosemary's Baby comes as this month's winner. Evidently, the best and the most chilling horror films end with The Evil`s triumph, they do not feature the gnarling monsters covered in slime - and somehow the effect is much more profound. Roman Polanski was at his peak that time - see how the film unravels, all the incidents can be explained rationally - as the pregnant girl fantasies - right till the last minutes. All the film you can expect the people around Rosemary prove they are what they seem - the nincompoop actor, the doting and endearingly eccentric old couple, the fatherly doctor - the reassuringly commanding figure. And the most thrilling aspect of the movie is the menace that lies beneath the happenings that look 97% normal.That feeling is very acute in the scene Roman Polanski likes the most (see his DVD interview) - the doctor and the husband lead their helpless victim to the waiting car, chauffeured by one of the coven, and the camera shows not only their progress - we see a big chunk of late afternoon New York with people strolling, relaxed, and the traffic rolls by leisurely, no one is aware of the drama that is happening just a few steps away. And there is no going back for Rosemary, the normal life ends, she is frantic but ultimately helpless.Another moment that the director calls his favorite is when Dr.Sapirstein sees the pills Ro has taken out of her handbag, takes them and shoves in his pocket. He is not angry - just disgrunted. Silly girl, a poor little thing trying to fight her glorious destiny.The casting is very good. Mia Farrow was famous only as an actress in the Peyton Place TV-series and the lack of Shakespearean background comes very handy in portraying an All-American newlywed moving into the nice appartment with the model husband to live her predictable and sweet mail-order style life. The coven is very Old World, the names are mostly weird-sounding, the film's undercurrent is the plot of senile and over-sophisticated Europe against youthful and happy America.We are lucky the initial candidates for the husband's part had declined or we would see Rosemary's Baby today as a Robert Redford movie or Jack Nicholson movie - the icons were not THAT famous back in 1968, not nearly, but today seeing one of them play the non-character would have been absurd.The pace is not forced, the director has a rather flattering view of our attention spans so the movie unfolds without the fear of becoming boring. Rosemary's Baby deserves at least two viewings - the first one in total ignorance of the plot's conclusion (though I do not think this can happen now) and the second with the full knowledge of the things to come, looking for hints and details.And the DVD is superb - it's mostly crisp image is a very welcome change from the vagueness of the tired VHS I own for the last decade.