Tess (1979)
Directed by Roman Polanski
A strong-willed peasant girl is sent by her father to the estate of some local aristocrats to capitalize on a rumour that their families are from the same line. This fateful visit commences an epic narrative of sex, class, betrayal, and revenge.
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What critics compared Tess to
And that may be where the old master from "Rosemary's Baby" (even better, "Chinatown," "Tess" and "Bitter Moon") has gone wrong commercially.
After all, this is the first time the Oscar nominated director of films such as "Chinatown" and "Tess" has returned to the horror genre since 1968's critically lauded classic, "Rosemary's Baby."
Away making movies in Europe since Chinatown, he has become a director of bits and pieces (with the exception of Tess), and while the oddments are still the work of a distinctive talent, the films come across less as fully realized achievements than as squanderings.
That’s the juicy question buried in the depths of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” an extraordinarily precise and well-made political thriller—the best thing Polanski has done since the seventies, when he brought out the incomparable “Chinatown” and the very fine “Tess.”
Even when Polanski has adapted literary classics by Shakespeare (Macbeth, 71) and Thomas Hardy (Tess, 79), he has managed, for better or worse, to achieve a level of visual and emotional virtuosity that reflects his personal demons.
In fact, the last film I can think of that was this immersively gorgeous was Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979) — another film adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel, and a film that I’d be hard-pressed to believe didn’t inform the look of Far from the Madding Crowd.
If Vinterberg does not immediately spring to mind as a likely Hardy interpreter, it may be because the author’s countryman, Michael Winterbottom, seemed to hold exclusive Hardy mining rights for most of the past two decades, during which he delivered a superior “Jude,” an India-set “Tess” (“Trishna”) and a massively underrated version of “The Mayor of Casterbridge” (transposed to the American West and retitled “The Claim”).
But though this “Madding Crowd” is a fairly superficial rendering of Hardy, which doesn’t exhibit the same degree of wrestling with the source material that Polanski showed in “Tess” and Michael Winterbottom has repeatedly demonstrated, not only in his underrated “Jude” but in his more innovative takes on “The Claim” (based on “The Mayor of Casterbridge”) and “Trishna” (based on “Tess”), it nonetheless works on that more mundane level.
The resulting film, "The Pianist," is finally here and it's the 69-year-old director's best movie since "Tess."
(He did the same with 1980's Tess, which was affecting enough to land Oscar nominations for best picture and director.)