Bitter Moon (1992)

Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon arrives on a Mediterranean cruise ship bound for Istanbul, where a British couple (Hugh Grant, Kristin Scott Thomas) fall into the orbit of a paraplegic American writer and his young French wife. The film is a study in erotic obsession told as a long, malicious anecdote. Its cast is white European and American to the last deckhand, with Victor Banerjee and Sophie Patel drifting through as a distinguished Indian gentleman and his daughter, present chiefly to dispense a gentle aphorism about marriage and children before the narrative resumes its business. They are decorative, and the film has no interest in them beyond that.

The provocations are plentiful and pointed at a male spectator. A same-sex kiss between Fiona and Mimi caps the New Year's Eve party, staged for the cheers of the assembled guests and the presumed gratification of the men watching. Oscar claims the women slept together, a boast that lands as titillation, not affirmation. Mimi does eventually dominate and humiliate her husband, and Fiona insists she can outdo anything Nigel manages. Yet the camera never stops appraising Mimi as an object to be degraded, which undercuts whatever authority the women are granted.

What the film refuses to do is sermonize. There is no economic critique, no environmental conscience, no meditation on disability beyond Oscar's paralysis as an instrument of cruelty and grotesquerie. Mr. Singh's mild observation about marital therapy is the closest thing to a thesis, and it is a throwaway. Polanski revels in amorality, and the picture ends in gunfire and embraces without a lesson attached. We are left with a nasty, well-made provocation that asks nothing of us but our attention, and offers nothing back but a chill.