01/09/2011

Screening very early on in the competition at the 68th Venice Film Festival, Carnage [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is adapted from the play The God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, who also co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Roman Polanski.

This 80-minute-long enclosed encounter unfolding in real time involves a meeting between two married couples following a childish quarrel at the end of which one of their sons intentionally injured the other with a stick. This incident, which at the outset isn’t serious, serves as a pretext for personal outpourings and it sets the four adults off on a journey which they won’t finish in the same state as they started...

This isn’t Polanski’s first stage-to-screen adaptation filmed in an enclosed space, with previous efforts including his takes on Macbeth and Death and the Maiden, but the director of The Fearless Vampire Killers hadn’t yet combined the exercise with his affinity for comedy. This is what he accomplishes with Carnage which transposes its elegant Hollywood cast — the couple played by John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster opposite Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet’s duo — to a Parisian studio where everything has been set up to give the illusion of a New York apartment, the almost absurd backdrop to this story.

Co-produced by France’s SBS Productions, Germany’s Constantin Film Produktion and Polish backers, Carnage is only European in its invisible framework and its writers, for the film seems to be very much aimed at an international audience, particularly an American one. It makes you wonder if this whole installation (and not just Dean Tavoularis’ set, but also the cast and the only two outdoor location shots which open and close the film) isn’t a nose-thumbing at the US authorities by a director who, for the same legal reasons, wasn’t able to come to the Mostra to defend his film.

According to three of the four actors, the six-week shoot made it easier to create a real alchemy between them and this is essential for it’s the entire film — inevitably very wordy — which is based as much on their verbal jousts as their body language where Foster is perhaps less convincing.

Carnage opens with polite phrases interspersed with imperceptible cutting remarks from one couple to the other, but very quickly, the veneer cracks and the confrontations take new directions. The mechanism rests on the principle of mounting tension made up of repeated elements. The running gag of the telephone calls, the use of the hairdryer, the vomiting fits of Winslet’s character, the hamster saga: all these ingredients add up to comic moments of chaos which lift the film out of the bourgeois intellectualism into which it could easily have fallen. Polanski maintains this humorous approach right to the film’s denouement which differs from the darker tones of the original play’s ending. If a light-hearted film like Carnage is a welcome addition to the filmography of a director who really needed to relax a bit, the apartment is reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby or The Tenant and it’s the sum of our expectations which is suddenly revised upwards as a result. There is no disappointment, but an entertainment which must free itself of all pretension before being really enjoyed for what it is: a parenthesis — another one — in the career of one of the greatest directors of our time.

(Translated from French)