It also fits neatly into Polanski's oeuvre as he approaches his 79th year.Īt the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. We're not invited to like these people.Ĭarnage belongs in a dramatic tradition of exposure, misogyny and painful-truth telling that descends from Strindberg through O'Neill to Osborne and Albee. Whiskey becomes the final great catalyst of revelation and the men unite by lighting up aggressively phallic Cuban cigars. Nancy vomits over Penelope's art catalogues, a moment as startling as the monster jumping out of John Hurt's stomach in Alien. But obscenities take over from coy nicknames as the bloodletting starts and the marriages are torn apart. Nancy and Alan's term of endearment, "Doodles", comes from a song in Guys and Dolls. Penelope and Michael call each other "Darjeeling" (a private version of "darling" they coined during their Indian honeymoon). But in his second stanza, Larkin refers to the fuckers-up being fucked up by people "who half the time were soppy-stern/ And half at one another's throats", both styles on display here. That's clearly what's happening to Zachary and Ethan, whom we see at a silent distance in a pre-credit scene and in a brief coda. Everyone knows Larkin's line: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad". Dishonesties, self-deceptions, shallowly buried prejudices and self-loathing are revealed. The velvet gloves come off the iron fists. Initially, they return out of politeness, then in anger, as if getting back in the ring, or on to the court for ruthless alternations between singles and mixed doubles. Three times the Cowans get out of the door but never beyond the lift. Once having left the house, the visitors would never have gone back again. The mistake Mike Nichols and his screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, made in their 1966 screen version of Edward Albee's play was to open it up. The mistake the younger couple make in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not leaving, as they're too much in thrall to George and Martha. They're still exuding conventional, slightly strained politeness as they complete typing out a joint statement that will obviate any public or legal engagement. We encounter the two pairs at the end of the warm-up phase. He's the one who worships "a god of carnage".Ĭarnage: watch an exclusive clip from Roman Polanski's new film Studiocanal The visitors are the more confident, socially somewhat grander Cowans: Nancy (Kate Winslet in edgy designer clothes) is an investment broker, Alan (Christoph Waltz performing a variation on his SS officer from Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds) is a suave, brutal, corporation lawyer, constantly on his mobile about the defence of a dodgy pharmaceutical company facing a class action. She talks in the argot of self-improvement texts, wears her heart on her sleeve and displays her culture on the coffee table. A concerned liberal, she writes earnest books about Africa's problems and is bent on improving Michael and elevating herself. Michael (John C Reilly in rumpled teddy bear mode), it transpires, is something of a roughneck, a salesman of kitchenware and sanitary equipment, hypergamously married to the prissy, humourless Penelope (an aggressively thin-lipped Jodie Foster). The comfortable, tasteful but not ostentatious flat belongs to Michael and Penelope Longstreet, parents of the victim, Ethan.
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The play exists in two settings, one French, as originally produced the other American, as presented on Broadway, and it's the latter that Polanski and Reza have adapted for the screen. He's the 10-year-old son of one of them, who has had a playground row with Ethan, the other couple's 10-year-old, and knocked out a couple of his teeth. Polanski has dropped the "God of" from the title but otherwise retained the claustrophobic setting of a single apartment, where two fortyish couples meet up through a need to talk about Zachary. Now Reza's play has come into the misanthropic hands of her fellow Parisian Roman Polanski and the match is perfect.