The Writer's Poke

The film is beautifully shot in black and white. Just a pleasure to watch in that regard. In terms of the basic premise, you have a Polish married couple in a private vehicle. It's a nice car, but they're squished together on the car's front bench seat. Shoulder touching shoulder, without any extra room. It's not meant to be a small compact car, but you're definitely not going to fit a more than 4 people in this car. The hitchhiker is younger. Maybe he's supposed to be half the age of the couple. Why does he walk around and hitchhike? Boredom, perhaps, although maybe the couple is bored, too. If you're rich and bored, you go out boating. If you're poor and bored, you go out hitchhiking. For whatever reason, the man decides to let the younger man ride with them. Then, he invites him to join their one-day cruise. Why? Even his wife will eventually ask him why. Is the older man "showing off"? Does he want to make the young man jealous of his life ...

Roman Polanski speaks five languages -- Polish, French, English, Spanish, and Russian -- and this is the first film he directed in English. In an interview included on the Criterion DVD, he said that for him, characters matter more than the story, because you will remember the characters long after you forget what the story and the plot elements were. And at least in the case of this movie, that's probably absolutely true. We are definitely going to remember Catherine Deneuve's performance, even if we never definitely learn why the character, Carol, is as she is.  The film opens with the close-up on a human eye -- Carol's (Catherine Deneuve) eye. The names of the movie's cast and crew come and go, but the eye continues to take up the background of the screen. Who is Carol? She's a young blonde French hairdresser living in London. She lives with her older sister, who is having an affair with a married man. Carol doesn't seem to like him much. He puts his toothbru...