Tearing down the facade in Carnage by Polanski

Roman Polański's had an endlessly meandering but inspiring life. Born into a Polish-Jewish family in Warsaw, he lived through the horror of the Nazi ghettos seeing the annihilation of his loved ones. In socialist Poland, he emerged as a talented film-maker with a style of his own and a boisterous personality that quickly outgrew what his homeland was ready to offer to let his creative skills out. After a brief period in London, his American career took off, possibly peaking with the creation of Chinatown, a dark gang drama starring Jack Nicholson, and Rosemary's Baby. It was marred by the gruesome murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, and friends in his private mansion by Charles Manson and his people. Another setback was the controversy surrounding the rape case, which forced Polański to leave the US and settle down in France.

With a biography like that and a cinematic talent to match, there is no surprise that Polański's films tend to be haunting and darkly coherent in their vision of the world. His latest production, Carnage, is a masterpiece that builds on and completes his legacy as one of the most original and skillful directors of our times.

It's an interior only drama that develops predominantly in dialogues, gestures, facial expressions and a single bout of vomiting. It's set in an affluent apartment in Brooklyn where two couples meet for a conflict resolution session after their sons take it out on each other in a street fight. Things seem to be going according to plan, they agree on a joint statement and the visiting couple (Kate Winslet and Christoper Waltz) get ready to leave, when the hosts (Jodie Foster and a phenomenal John C. Reilly) decide to invite them back for coffee.

O'Reilly: I have no patience for this touchy-feely bullshit. I'm a short-tempered son of a bitch.

What happens later is an urban farce at its best, with all four characters dropping social niceties they exhibited in abundance when trying to resolve the conflict and reverting to primitive, unabashed instincts. There is talking behind one's back, a fair amount of spite, neglect and contempt, accusations galore and an endless suppy of bad blood.

Carnage's had a mixed reception. One NY-based critic pointed out that it falls short of recreating the genuine Brooklyn setting by, for instance, not letting the characters start their relationship on a first name basis, which is a standard there, or giving unlikely names to children. I find this attitude flawed. Polański offers a universal story that uses Brooklyn as a stage of sorts, especially that the film is so theatrical in nature. Such script imperfections are unlikely to be noticed anywhere else outside Brooklyn itself. In fact, Woody Allen's latest European productions have run into similar criticism in Britain, where not only critics but also the audience deemed dialogues highly unnatural for modern-day London. However, outside this particular community, it wasn't that much of an issue as no one could really tell if it was natural or not. People concentrated on the story rather than accent or details of style.

As for Polański's Carnage, I found two ideas by critics inspiring. The first one, by Tadeusz Sobolewski, highlighted Polański's obsession with the evil and its place just underneath the thin veneer of social conventions and niceties. The idea has come up again and again in the Polish director's films, ever since his student shorts that relatively few people outside Poland (and even in it) have seen. The other one centered on the concept of entrapment, this returning inability to step out of conventions, roles, conflicts, instincts. In Carnage, this sense of confinement comes from the fact that the characters are incapable of leaving the apartment and overcome their grudges.

But for me personally it was the story of disintegration as excessive accumulation of grievances finally brings people to a boiling point. We are invited to witness a rare moment when civilized adults unintentionally let their frustration find its messy outlet. In our hectic lives, where we are repeatedly asked, explicitly and implicitly, to put on masks in order to handle modern pressures, seeing people like us completely lose it is liberating, hilarious and oddly familiar.