A low-flame suspense thriller that comes, by and by, to a pretty steady and sustained simmer. Polanski's main notion of tension is to have actors in the same frame standing at radically different distances from the camera, so that the visual plane is pushed inward, like a door ajar. (A slight relaxation from Rosemary's Baby or parts of Repulsion, where his notion was to put a wide-angle lens on the camera and stretch the image like spandex.) Harrison Ford does his part, too, speaking at a low rumble that has an effect like a vibrating pillow. He plays a man whose wife has disappeared from their Paris hotel room half an hour after check-in, and who (we have only the title to go by) is frantic about it. The ordinary-man-extraordinary-circumstances formula would have been enough to conjure up in most moviegoers' minds the term "Hitchcockian" -- even without the rear-screen-projection driving scenes, and the dangling by fingernails from rooftops, and the recurrent visual motif (homage to Saboteur?) of small-scale Statues of Liberty. If excitement is a little scarce as compared to The Master, ambience abounds, and without any touristic craning of necks or snapping of Scenic Views. This is Paris as only an insider knows it. There is plenty of room, at the same time, for Polanski to indulge his -- or the East European's -- sniggering sense of the absurd, and his somewhat sublimer sense of the creepy: a policeman scissoring out just the wife's face from a family snapshot for police records, and leaving a void in the dead-center -- an image that all by itself stands as persuasive testimony to Polanski's skills as a visual storyteller. Emmanuelle Seigner, Betty Buckley. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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