Thriller Thursdays: Bitter Moon - A Roman Polanski thriller that gripped the 90s

In our new weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we’ll recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine

How does something precious slide into redundancy? How does something magnificent combust into the mordant? Why does every height, reached by the ascent, necessitate the inevitable decline? Indeed, why does love have to be such a thrill, a tease, an obsession, and then a death wish?

Bitter Moon is, on one hand, a celebration of the tenderness of love and its concomitant universe-creation, but in its next beat is a psychological thriller examining the arc of obsession masquerading as love, and love masquerading as a compulsion.

The first shot in the Bitter Moon is prophetic, the sea is seen through a porthole of a ship cabin with its continuous flow of water beneath a steady sky. But the sky is drowned in the sea. And a relaxed happy couple, Fiona (Kristen Scott Thomas) and Oscar (Hugh Grant), on a trip to revive whatever parts in their marriage required revival. Fiona encounters a seas sick woman, Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner), in the washroom and helps her. On the way out, Fiona tells Mimi that they are on the way to India, and on enquiring where she was going, Mimi slowly answers, "further, much further." Nigel encounters her again when he sees her dancing alone, as he goes to the bar for a nightcap. And on attempting to strike a conversation with her, is rebuffed, and Mimi leaves with a remark soaked in withering sarcasm, “I leave you with your own magnetic irresistible personality.” But it’s obvious that Nigel is smitten.

Soon enough he is accosted by a paraplegic in a wheelchair, Oscar (Peter Coyote), who warns Nigel to be wary of Mimi, as she is a "walking man trap", but if he is smitten by Mimi, he should first hear a tale - their love story, as Oscar was the husband. And thus begins a sordid saga, which Oscar tells Nigel over several sessions of tea.

The tale goes thus. Oscar first sees Mimi whilst taking a bus ride, the 96 route, and helps her when he realizes she doesn't have a bus ticket. He loses sight of her and exclaims, "my sorceress in white sneakers", as he is accosted down, and says, "I'd been granted a glimpse of heaven, then dumped on the sidewalk of rue d'Assas." He simply can't get her out of his mind and spends days searching for her, till he finds her as a waitress in a restaurant. He muses, "There was a freshness and innocence about her, an almost disconcerting blend of sexual maturity and childish naivete that touched my world-weary heart, and effaced the age difference between us." He asks her out on a date.

There is a childlike beauty about how their story grows, as they scour Paris, deeply in love, the streets, the people, the shops, and the charm which love accords to ordinary life. Oscar says, "Nothing ever surpassed the rapture of the first awakening. I might have been Adam with the taste of apple fresh in my mouth. I was looking at all the beauty in the world embodied in a single female form, and I knew, with sudden blinding certainty, this was it."

Of course, they move in together. And their lovemaking crosses a Rubicon - sadomasochistic games, domination, voyeurism, the slow sensuality turns incendiary. A scene with milk is as sexy, and another with a razor is as dangerous. But there is a commonplace life to be lived also, an outside world which has to be dealt with. And Mimi was falling short in the tiniest of quotidian disciplines. And that was the commencement in Oscar's mind, of misgivings, of doubts about the longevity of their relationship. He muses - “though Mimi's face still held a thousand mysteries for me, her body a thousand sweet promises, lurking at the back of my mind, was an unspoken fear that we'd already scaled the heights of our relationship, that it would all be downhill from now on."

The story takes an unexpected turn from here. The souring of their idyllic tale, from Oscar's perspective, makes him feel imprisoned and restless. And he changes, wants her to change - and the whole love story changes.

Director Roman Polanski, whilst delving into the intricacies of obsession and ardour, also examines the levels of debasement a man is capable of, in the pursuit of both what he wants to get, as well as what he wants to give up. And much deeper than a love story gone wrong, Polanski uses the film to examine the tragic trajectory of the seasons of love, the truth of the old adage that true love stories start when love ends.

Oscar and Mimi tease Nigel and play with his emotions, as his interest and passion for Mimi grow, and in that deleterious game lies an extension of their own play with each other, once they get tired of it. They are oblivious to the harm and destruction they could bring about in other lives. But embedded within that piteous cruelty lay the seeds of self-immolation. The shocking denouement which ensues is possibly the only way things could have possibly ended before they burnt down everyone they met.

In an absolutely bravura performance, Emmanuelle Seigner, who is also Roman Polanski's wife, gives a no-holds-barred performance of great sensuality and vulnerability, where she exposes her body and soul with rare perspicacity and fragility, to show every scar she carried inside-out. And Peter Coyote engenders both pity and loathing with the sinusoidal nature of his manic fixation. Hugh Grant is smooth and progressively rudderless, as he plays with fire; and Kristen Scott Thomas is terrific as she sees her husband drift away, and rebounds with unexpected ferocity.

Ironically the end was preordained, almost engineered by Mimi, as an inevitability, which she had recognised as the only possible end to a relationship which had already been rendered into cinder and ash. Human beings are rarely rational about some of their most important relationships. But, like so many endeavours, they always get aboard their mistakes with rare energy, but flounder when they see the end coming. There is either an ego which comes in the way of an appropriate finale or bewilderment as to how to end things. Humans are, after all, humans - weak, breakable, jealous, uncertain and finally simply flummoxed. Loving is not simple and nothing prepares a human being for the cessation of its withering. In its incendiary nature, it consumes everything. Love thus never has survivors, only victims.

Trivia:

1. Journalist Matthew Tempest once confessed that when students, both he and film director Christopher Nolan shared "a soft spot" for Bitter Moon.
2. The cabin on the ship in which Mimi and Oscar stay is numbered DS1, which is simply a playful abbreviation of the movie's theme of Dominance and Submission.
3. As writer, producer, and director, Roman Polanski performed the three critical roles in the movie. In addition, his wife was the film's heroine.

Watch Bitter Moon here.

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)