Death & The Maiden
by Roman Polanski
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VHS Tape Cover Information
Actor: Ben Kingsley, Jonathan Vega, Krystia Mova, Sigourney Weaver, Stuart Wilson (II)Director: Roman Polanski
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
Running Time: 103 minutes
Release Date: 1997-04-15
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: New Line Home Video
Studio: New Line Home Video
VHS Movie Reviews of Death & The Maiden
Movie Review: Not as good as many claim
Summary: 3 Stars
If you have read the play by Ariel Dorfman, I think you will find this movie adpatation to be wanting. Though there are fine performances by Weaver and Kingsley, Polanski connects too many of the dots for the viewer, leaving little doubt as to the credibility (or madness) of the main characters. It was this very ambiguity that made the play so enjoyable, but this is not evident in the DVD.
Summary of Death & The Maiden
Roman Polanski's film adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's stunning play about the legacy of torture has more in common with the director's first film, Knife in the Water (with all the latter's unnerving ambiguities about power, sexual transgression, and confused alliances among three people) than a straightforward political parable. Sigourney Weaver (a bit underwhelming in this role, but good overall) plays a former political prisoner in an unnamed South American country that has gone democratic. She is married to a government official (fine work by Stuart Wilson) heading up official inquiries into the practice of torture under the former regime. Still shattered by her experience, Weaver's character seeks safe haven in closets of the cliff-top house she shares with her husband. But when the latter comes home in the company of a seemingly nice fellow (a brilliant Ben Kingsley), she believes she recognizes the stranger as the interrogator who raped her repeatedly in prison. She violently takes him hostage, and what ensues is a hurricane of fury and confusion, as Kingsley's terrified character denies all accusations, Wilson's guilt-ridden spouse can't decide whom to defend, and Weaver turns her psychosexual rage into a weapon of humiliation. Dorfman adapted the screenplay himself, but there's no question that Polanski is leading us down a familiar path of human betrayal and terror that he crossed in such films as Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion, and Bitter Moon. At times stunning in its bluntness and compelling to the last, Death and the Maiden literally takes us to the edge of oblivion, where--in Polanski's films--the hardest truths always seem to fall into a heretofore unknown perspective. --Tom KeoghArt House & International VHS Video
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