Under (And Over) the Roofs of Paris
BY
Nick Pinkerton
On Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988), and Harrison Ford’s exquisitely frayed performance therein.
Frantic plays 7 Ludlow as part of On the Run in Paris.
If you grew up in the 1980s, it’s not unlikely that your earliest conception of the idea of a male “movie star” had something to do with Harrison Ford. For a 20-year stretch—beginning with 1977’s Star Wars and ending, approximately, with 1997’s Air Force One—Ford was the axiomatic definition of name-on-the-marquee fame: as close as one could get to a sure thing at the box office, admired by and/or swooned over by men and women alike.
The irony of this, which is only more pronounced now after the subsequent decades of Ford’s excruciating, spaced-out, late night chat show appearances and begrudging, punch-the-clock big-screen turns, is that he has always been spectacularly ill-suited to the role of celebrity leading man. His rise to stardom is, of course, inextricably tied to his performances in two phenomenally popular pop/pulp franchises, to Han and Indiana, and Ford more than provides the requisite bluff and charm and swashbuckling bravado to both parts. But while Ford can play the cocksure hero to the hilt, there is occasion to wonder if he isn’t working against the grain when doing so—this, anyways, would go some ways to explaining the air of exhausted indifference that’s hung over his last quarter century in the public eye, when he has so often given the impression he’d much prefer to be off somewhere crashing vintage airplanes than grinning wanly at Jimmy Fallon or whomever.
In fact, might not his intrinsic qualities as an actor be those used to such fine effect in the two films he made, taking supporting parts, with Francis Ford Coppola, The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979): that is to say, his air of creeping uneasiness, for Ford can be a singularly awkward, anxious screen presence. David Thomson, in a less-than-admiring entry on the actor in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, gets something of this when writing of Ford’s “distance” and “restrained, chilling patience”—but Ford’s wary stiffness, so often suppressed, can be a marvelous asset. In those Coppola films, Ford’s studiously bland comportment lends an air of ineffable squirminess to every scene he’s in, while as a leading man, he excels as the harried Harrison, out of his depth, utterly maladroit, and incapable of taking a single step without a misstep. (It is worth noting that Jacques Demy had campaigned to cast Ford in his 1969 Model Shop, after his “discovery” by wife Agnès Varda, and must have seen in the young man a certain capacity for driftless ennui and existential anguish.)
Witness (1985)
Like Peter Weir’s superlative Witness three years earlier, which had Ford as a Philadelphia detective going undercover in a Pennsylvania Amish community, Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988) capitalizes on the more fiddly, off-kilter aspects of Ford’s screen presence, casting him again as a stranger in a strange land, unfamiliar with the local customs and trying (and spectacularly failing) to negotiate his alien surroundings and blend in with the natives. Polanski’s film sets its scene in Paris, a Paris far from picture postcards and Piaf. Ford plays one “Dr. Richard Walker”—one of those spectacularly drab, white bread character names in which his filmography abounds—an American surgeon who, as the film opens, has just arrived in the City of Lights, where he’s slated to deliver a lecture at a medical conference and, as a fringe benefit, enjoy a romantic getaway with his wife, Sondra (Betty Buckley). The couple’s first trip to Gay Paree since a honeymoon some years and a couple of kids in the past is cut short when, after checking into their hotel room, Sondra leaves while Walker is showering, and hasn’t returned by the time he awakens from a profound post-red-eye slumber.
A dutiful recounting of the film’s plot—the script is credited to Polanski and long-time collaborator Gérard Brach, with Chinatown (1974) screenwriter Robert Towne having come in for a polish—does little to distinguish Frantic from the average run of contemporary thrillers à la Hitchcock. His lady’s vanishment, Dr. Walker determines, has something to do with her having retrieved the wrong checked valise at the airport. Brushed off by the local police—jaded products of a culture to which adultery is as central as the baguette—who imply that Sondra most likely has a Parisian lover stashed somewhere, Walker begins his own investigation, following a trail of clues that leads him to Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner, in her first really substantive role), a tough, pouty party girl moonlighting as an international smuggler. The clues aren’t particularly original either—that staple of 1940s noir, the telltale matchbook, makes an appearance. Neither is the MacGuffin, a krytron that detonates nuclear weapons, being fought over by Arab and Israeli factions. (The inspiration for the detail of the krytron seemingly came via Polanski’s friendship with film producer Arnon Milchan, a former operative for the Israeli intelligence agency Lekem, though for practical purposes it serves the same function as illicit microfilm in any number of Cold War thrillers.) If somewhat by-the-book in some regards, Frantic is, however, never less than inspired when it comes to matters of granular detail.
Much of what distinguishes the film—and Ford’s performance is a big part of this—is how completely it captures the peculiar sense of disorientation experienced by the foreigner abroad, negotiating a landscape in which the dimensions are ever so slightly off from what one is accustomed to. The film’s first line is spoken by Sondra as she and the doctor are being driven into central Paris through a landscape of glass-box corporate skyrises that might be anywhere in the developed world, accompanied by Culture’s “Jah Rastafari” playing on their cabbie’s stereo, a roots reggae tune that doesn’t precisely put one in mind of broad boulevards and café culture: “Do you know where you are?” she asks.
Frantic (1988)
At any given point in the film, which follows Dr. Walker as he fumbles his way, as one-half blind, through a befuddling urban environment of New Wave (as in pop, not Godard) discotheques, cramped garrets, parking garages, and houseboats that serve as rehearsal spaces for funk quartets, the answer to this question would be a resounding “No.” Paris, as Polanski presents it, has largely been shorn of the hallmarks of Parisian-ness that might render it familiar from films and mass-market reproductions of impressionist canvases. The diegetic pop on the soundtrack—which includes Jamaican-born Grace Jones’s reggae-and-tango-infused “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango)” as a leitmotif—has a distinctly Caribbean bent, and, outside of some snatches of Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris” sung by the couple, nary a chanson standard is heard in the film, with a bit of accordion in Ennio Morricone’s theme the most distinctly “Gallic” element of the score. (Frantic, incidentally, credits Tunis-born impresario and DJ Claude Challe as its “Nightlife Advisor.”)
We do get a few glimpses of the Eiffel Tower, visible from the Walkers’ hotel in the 9th arrondissement, but the movie, rather perversely, makes far more extensive use of a monument associated with a different metropolis on the other side of the Atlantic, the Statue of Liberty: the contraband krytron is hidden in a chintzy miniature Lady Liberty, and Frantic’s climax takes place on the Île aux Cygnes in the Seine, home, since 1889, of a quarter-scale version of the verdigris-coated giantess by sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s that overlooks New York Harbor. “I wanted to get rid of everything that was too obviously Parisian and tried to show the city of today,” Polanski, a Paris resident of 11 years when he made Frantic, would say of the film, and one cannot claim that he held back in stripping the city of its glamor; the Arc de Triomphe and Tuileries appear in Frantic not at all, while the Pizza Hut next to the Le Grand Hotel is practically a supporting character. The city the film shows is cold, vaguely malevolent, and very sleazy, and if you love Paris—not the package-tour version of it, but the gray, ill-smelling, oft-overcast city itself—you will recognize it immediately.
Dr. Walker’s vulnerability to faux pas after faux pas in clumsily coping with his unfamiliar surroundings persists throughout Polanski’s film, a thriller that at times verges on slapstick comedy. For example: when a dealer sidles up to Walker at a sleazy boîte de nuit asking if the doctor is looking for “the white lady,” our hapless hero takes the euphemism for cocaine to be a reference to his wife, winds up awkwardly doing a bump in the bathroom stall out of politesse, loses half of the proffered blow on his shirt and then, drying off his nose after flushing out his nostrils in the sink, trails half a roll of toilet paper behind him on his way out of the W.C.
You would be hard-pressed to find a more accident-prone lead in the annals of ’80s action cinema than Walker. He catches his necktie in the clasp of the contraband suitcase, almost leaves a crucial piece of evidence—that matchbook—behind in a cab, and can’t seem to remember when and if he has his hotel keys on his person. Waking on a hideaway houseboat after getting roundhouse kicked into unconsciousness by a Mossad agent, he proceeds to subject himself to further cranial trauma by bashing his skull on the vessel’s low ceilings and doorways—not once but twice. Moving to shake a woman’s hand later, in another disco, he’ll nearly upset a bucket of champagne onto her dress, and when Michelle drags Dr. Walker onto the club’s floor shortly thereafter, sensuously undulating against him in her skintight red dress, the flustered Walker quite evidently doesn’t know what to do with his sorely tempted hands—as with Hugh Grant’s mortifying frugging in Bitter Moon (1992), Polanski gets ample comic mileage out of the average buttoned-down Anglo-Saxon heterosexual male’s terror of dance. Twenty years married and to all evidence happily so—Polanski, in a 1988 interview, rather uncharitably stated that Walker “loves his wife, even if she is two years his senior and not particularly attractive”—the chaste, upright Walker runs a gauntlet of mild sexual mortifications that include being temporarily trapped in a dead man’s apartment by a couple enjoying an interlude of cunnilingus in the downstairs lobby, and a series of encounters with cops and colleagues who quite naturally conclude that the scrumptious gamine at his side is a Paris fling. The language barrier provides Dr. Walker with still another hurdle to trip over, his linguistic skills not going much further than an occasional, abashedly muttered, “Je parlais non français.” (Ford will be similarly overwrought playing another surgeon with unusual marital difficulties in Andrew Davis’s 1993 The Fugitive, but his “Dr. Richard Kimble” in that film is nowhere near as much of a stumblebum as Dr. Walker.)
Frantic (1988)
One needs not have been caught up in cloak-and-dagger intrigues while overseas to understand something of Walker’s plight; to the North American newly arrived or freshly returned to Europe, the Old Country of narrow, coiled stairwells, phone booth-sized hotel elevators, and cramped Peugeots tends to feel pinched, constrictive, at once familiar and disconcertingly out-of-scale, a hazardous terrain offering an infinity of opportunities for the blundering, jet-lagged visitor to do damage to themselves: cobblestone streets ready to twist an ankle, tight passages lying in wait to catch a cavalierly swinging Yankee elbow.
Frantic’s vivid, immersive depiction of the foreigner’s experience in an alien and unwelcoming environment has multiple precedents in Polanski’s work: Catherine Deneuve’s isolated Belgian émigré immured in a London flat in Repulsion (1965), for example, or the part played by Polanski himself in his Paris-set The Tenant (1976), that of the meek, nebbishy “Trelkovsky,” whose suspiciously un-French surname seems to earn him the suspicion and enmity of most everyone he meets. (Adding to the disconcertment, the film’s Paris is largely populated by aging American actors, including Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, and Shelley Winters.)
One may extrapolate that this abiding interest in narratives of ambient hostility has something to do with the fact that Polanski is a Paris-born Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, a member of a people often regarded as rootless cosmopolitans and consequently treated as “belonging” nowhere; in any case, Frantic is one of a few films that makes some sense of Ford’s statement about his own mixed ethnic ancestry: “As a man I’ve always felt Irish, as an actor I’ve always felt Jewish.” (After filming Frantic, Polanski would take the Paris stage to play Gregor Samsa in a theater adaptation of a celebrated work by another Mitteleuropean Jewish artist renowned for his ability to evoke smothering paranoia, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.)
Walker, an everyman dropped into a suspense-thriller plot by circumstance rather than inclination, is scarcely equipped to play the part of international secret agent, but he does bring a surgeon’s methodical scrupulousness to the high-pressure scenario he’s thrust into—qualities the character shares with the infamously detail-obsessive Polanski, who achieves the illusion of realism in Frantic via an enormous amount of precisely considered artifice. The film’s interiors were either manipulated to achieve specific effects—Polanski recounts having production designer Pierre Guffroy, with whom he’d worked since The Tenant, and his team paint the walls of Le Grand in a uniform, subdued gray—or recreated entirely to the production’s needs, as in the case of the Blue Parrot nightclub, a studio-built facsimile of Les Bains Douches, a legendary spot located in a former thermal bath in the 3rd from 1978 to 2010 and, at the time of Frantic’s shoot, co-owned by Challe.
Frantic is a film where seemingly no particular detail has been left to chance: the repeated inclusion of low ceilings in cinematographer Witold Sobociński’s framings, cumulatively lending the film a sense of smothering enclosure; the exquisitely filigreed sound mix by Jean-Pierre Ruh, preeminent sonic genius of French cinema from the 1970s on; even the throwaway gag shot of two pigeon’s copulating, which anticipates the breathtaking “kicker” of Polanski’s late-style stunner The Palace (2023). In this environment, Ford has free rein to explore his too-often neglected capacity for performances of fine, finicky minutiae and mounting, sweaty apprehension; in the vise-grip of Polanski’s iron maiden filmmaking, Ford is liberated from the prerogatives of his Hollywood persona, playing an all-American Gregor Samsa who wakes up bleary-eyed one day from a nap to find his world irrevocably altered, thence to scuttle furtively through the grimy gutters of Paris.
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art; his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s, and the Village Voice. He is the editor of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include monographs on Mondo movies (True/False) and the films of Ruth Beckermann (Austrian Film Museum), a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Fireflies Press), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk). The Sweet East, a film from his original screenplay directed by Sean Price Williams, premiered in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, is currently in wide release across US cinemas.
Frantic (1988)
