Death And The Maiden

Roman Polanski is drawn to small spaces. From "Knife in the Water" to "Bitter Moon" and now in "Death and the Maiden," the Polish director ghettoizes his viewers' sense of the world. Even when he works outside of a ship cabin or a claustrophobic dwelling, as in "Chinatown," Polanski creates a tense, creepy closeness between his characters and the audience.

In this absorbing meditation on the tormenting limits of revenge, Paulina Escobar (Sigouney Weaver) subjects Dr. Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley) - seemingly an innocent visitor to her isolated seaside house - to an all-night trial. Is Miranda really the man who tortured and repeatedly raped Escobar under the country's former brutal regime? Pressing her human rights attomey husband, Gerardo (Stuart Wilson), into conflicted service as Miranda's defender and go-between, Escobar is determined to confront her past, even if that means committing murder.

Polanski and writers Rafael Yglesias ("Fearless") and Ariel Dorfman (who adapts his play) set their drama in an unnamed country , the better to allow the theme to be perceived as universal. Ironically, the picture's title and musical refrain come from the string quartet by that most civilized of Viennese composers, Franz Schubert.

Although "Death and the Maiden" builds slowly, it does ultimately manage to burrow beneath the viewer's skin. Polanski and his writers have tightened the play's realism by adding behavioral details; those insights are most telling in Weaver's intense portrait of a survivor, which resonates far beyond its political context and illustrates the painful psychology of victims of violent crime everywhere. Wilson, however, might be the more memorable because he's the least known of the three actors; his performance as a just, rational man is finely calibrated, allowing Gerardo's hysteria to stay believably under control. And Kingsley is in top form as the gentleman and Good Samaritan who might be a monster.

The ending is more unlikely than satisfying, but "Death and the Maiden" is a disturbing vision of where victim and victimizer meet.

--By Rick Schultz in "Boxoffice," Feb. 1995