Controversial director Roman Polanski’s Frantic was released the year his legal problems with the American justice system were heightened. Polanski had fled America and a successful career in Hollywood in 1978 to escape possible incarceration on the charge of raping a 13-year-old girl. In 1988, the victim sued Polanski, bringing the world’s focus back on the case. By then, Polanski had retreated to France, returning in one sense to his European roots (he was born in Paris and raised in Poland).
It’s tempting to see Frantic as yet another expression of the paranoia that Polanski brilliantly explored in his previous films, including Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, and possibly felt in his personal life. The thriller can be rented on Apple TV+, Prime Video, YouTube Movies and Google Play Movies.
Frantic has been described as a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s wrong-man-in-the-wrong-place movies. But the tale of a doctor looking for his missing wife equally bear traces of American film noir as well as gritty French crime dramas.
Richard (Harrison Ford) and Sondra (Betty Buckley) check into a hotel in Paris ahead of a medical conference that Richard is to attend. Sondra disappears , setting into motion a series of strange and at times darkly comic events.
The hotel staff shrugs. Might Sondra have traipsed off with an old flame in the City of Love? The police and even American consular staff are equally indifferent to Richard’s plight, forcing him to embark on amateur sleuthing.
A clue found in a suitcase that has been swapped for Sondra’s leads Richard to Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner), a small-time drug dealer. Accompanied by Michelle, Richard becomes a tourist of Parisian nightlife, running into a bunch of off-kilter characters along the way.
The thrumming tension that pervades Frantic is in great part due to legendary Polish cinematographer Witold Sobocinski. Without resorting to the gimmicks that Hitchcock liked to use, Sobocinski creates an unsettling mood through camera lenses, large close-ups and different perspectives to heighten Richard’s nightmarish situation. The atmospheric camerawork and evocative locations create a version of Paris where just about anything can happen.
The stylistic flourishes exist alongside regular camerawork that isolates Richard. Even as he rushes from one place to the next in search of Sondra, regular life goes on in the rest of Paris. The suspense is built up in a matter-of-fact manner. Richard is no swash-buckler but always an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.
Harrison Ford was already well known because of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. Ford’s rugged charisma and plausibility as a a regular hero have been channelled for a series of films about men on impossible quests – most recently, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
In Frantic, Ford is a rumpled man on an unpredictable journey, utterly believable in his all-American decency and frustration at the ways of the French. Apart from Ford, Emmanuelle Seigner is compelling as the woman who is swept up by Richard’s mission.
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