rebecca LANDO

Roman Polanski’s perspective is a unique one, both in a literal, visual sense and psychologically. He’s a brilliant visual storyteller without ever actually filming a particularly unique plot: Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, Frantic are all engaging and thrilling movies despite plots that are or become, at one point or another, fairly rote.

Polanski’s power is in his paranoia: shots are framed from an ominously vigilant and anonymous 3rd person perspective, making the viewer uneasy and hyperaware. Eyes and danger seem to lurk in every vista, around every door. Rarely is anyone watching, but you feel them. You feel the characters - Rosemary, Jake, Dr. Walker, The Ghost - feeling watched. That tingle at the back of the neck is relentlessly omnipresent in Polanski’s movies.

Throughout The Ghost Writer, The Ghost - and the audience- face scenes that are vaguely threatening without there being a blatant menace. The first thing that happens after The Ghost accepts his assignment is a mugging: he steps out of his publisher’s office and is quickly beaten and robbed of a manuscript by two figures in motorcycle helmets. Is this a harbinger of what’s to come, or does it create the story? The politician Adam Lang’s memoir manuscript is kept under lock and key and cannot be removed from the room. Is The Ghost being set up, or is Lang’s strict security making him paranoid? Polanski frames The Ghost with wide open backgrounds, sometimes empty, sometimes inhabited by a servant sweeping the floor. Or is the servant spying on The Ghost? These uncertainties fuel the film and capture our attention. We don’t know who the bad guys are - or if there even are any - and the tension is riveting.

Polanski’s history fuels and justifies his paranoia, his sense of persecution. Surviving the Holocaust as a child, his pregnant wife brutally murdered, his adult life spent running from the spectre of his own crime despite signing a plea bargain and being pardoned from serving time in prison by the judge. Defensive, wary, fearful - Polanski’s characters bring a sense of being marked to the screen.

Which is a large part of The Ghost Writer’s appeal. The Ghost, from the start, is jumpy and defensive, feeling threatened before any potential threats are revealed. Is he right to be suspicious and paranoid? Or does he bring the movie’s events on himself? The Ghost claims to want happy indifference yet finds himself willingly unravelling a mystery that could be a conspiracy. Do we seek pre-existing monsters, or does searching create its own monsters? When The Ghost is beaten and mugged immediately after accepting the Lang assignment, does the mugging become the lens we see the rest of the movie through - change The Ghost’s approach to the events that follow, color every interaction that occurs after - or is it a part of events already occurring? Is The Ghost’s fate already sealed or does he bring it on himself by searching for it? Most likely, it’s both.

The film ends quickly, brutally, and elegantly. The final shot is a thing of beauty - and as much an open-ended mystery as the rest of the film. Polanski doesn’t lay the film out like dots to connect: this may lead to that, and one action may cause the next, but it’s never clear what is accident and what is intentional. If a conspiracy is the truth gone sinister, then what is coincidence? By looking for conspiracy, are you certain to find one? Where does coincidence end and conspiracy begin? And when you have no one to talk to and nowhere to turn, what’s the difference between the two?