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One of the great feature debuts in film history, KNIFE IN THE WATER won the top prize at the Venice film festival, landed Polanski on the cover of Time Magazine, and won him an Oscar nomination. (The film lost to Fellini's 8 1/2.) KNIFE set the template for much of Polanski's subsequent work. Concise, elegant, and intense, it is a three-character study in what were to become Polanski's favourite themes: sexual cruelty, violence, vanity, isolation, betrayal, and paranoia. A successful, somewhat pompous sportswriter on holiday with his wife invites a hitchhiker to join them on a sailing expedition. Once on the water, the writer's jealousy of the other man's youth, virility, and good looks manifests itself in an escalating contest for the woman, a contest which begins to focus on a blatantly phallic object - the hunting knife of the title. Sometimes seeming like Polish Pinter with its atmosphere of game-playing and polite, impalpable violence, “of all Polanski's intensely concentrated thrillers, KNIFE IN THE WATER may be the sharpest” (Nathan Lee, The New York Times ). “Subtle in exposition and deadly in effect. . . . scarcely, if ever, been equalled as an exposition of erotic tension. . . . a piece of cinema of almost suffocating power” (Derek Malcolm).
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