MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Frantic’ Chase Through Paris

In Roman Polanski’s “Frantic” (selected theaters)--an elegant, icy thriller about an American doctor chasing his wife’s kidnapers through the deadlier byways of Paris--we can tell after 10 minutes that we’re in the hands of a superb craftsman.

Polanski steeps us immediately in a dark side of the City of Light--not the sun-dappled, melodious city of our grand illusions but a more alienating, harrowing place. It’s full of barrenness and menace, with blank-walled modern buildings, freeways unwinding under gray skies and seedy little hotels where trysts are made, thighs entwine and throats are cut.

Racing gamely through this increasingly peculiar and terrifying city, a very ordinary man--Harrison Ford in a near-perfect performance as American doctor Richard Walker--gradually finds his defenses peeled away, his sureties smashed. After his lady vanishes, Walker is left helplessly petitioning an impersonal, bland bureaucracy: a cynical house detective, a helpful concierge, the exasperated police and a smug and lazy U.S. Embassy official (another crisp, witty job by John Mahoney.)

Frenziedly, he turns to informants, petty criminals and drug dealers. After discovering one corpse, Walker yokes himself to a murderously enticing street girl named Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner, granddaughter of legendary stage-screen star Louis Seigner), a small-time smuggler whose suitcase was switched with his wife’s at the airport. Michelle’s employers are his persecutors, and she proceeds, with reckless insouciance, to guide him through a cool hell of messy apartments, lavatory cocaine, rooftop terror and cold-eyed killers.

Although Polanski’s film has the same title as an old Louis Malle thriller, it is the spirit of Hitchcock that reigns here: a “Wrong Man” plot with twists out of “The 39 Steps,” “The Lady Vanishes” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

Hitchcock’s sense of evil is different from Polanski’s. For Polanski, evil is tantalizing, and corruption is a voluptuous lure winding through a labyrinth of dark corridors and cul-de-sacs. For Hitchcock, evil is a threat and the complacent are punished. Here, the Walkers (Ford and Betty Buckley) are, at first, almost soporifically complacent, surrounded by familiar sights--like the Pizza Hut scrunched down next to their Le Grand Hotel. As the camera prowls behind them at Polanski’s usual voyeur’s-eye level, neither recognizes the deadly, skewed blankness of the place--and Walker is inanely singing “I Love Paris” in the shower while his wife is lured away by unseen assailants.

Polanski may be following another man’s game, but he establishes his own rhythm early on--a pace very different from Hitchcock’s thrilling measures or the hopped-up, methedrine frenzy of most current American Hitchcock imitators. Throughout, Polanski holds to this mesmeric, excruciating rhythm, while his backgrounds--a precarious hotel roof, the walkways of the Seine, bars, discos and parking lots--assume a malevolent solidity.

For the first two-thirds of the film, Polanski’s signature can be seen in its qualities of sinister social rot, alienation, urban absurdity and sexual menace. But then, to a certain extent, he eases off. You suspect that “Frantic” may have been a fun film for him, a retreat to a safe genre. The plot here is the same fish-out-of-water standard used endlessly--and badly--in any number of recent American movies, but Polanski pumps some nightmare realism into the situation--aided immeasurably by Witold Sobocinski’s grim photography, Ennio Morricone’s chilly score and Paris itself.

If there’s a major flaw in “Frantic,” it’s that the movie doesn’t go far enough. It resolves itself too conventionally. Polanski lapses into easy comedy, patented windups and stereotypical Arab villains, rather than plunging deeper into chaos and the dark. He and his long-time screenwriter Gerard Brach don’t really mine the special perversity and social paranoia they’re experts at.

But, if “Frantic” (MPAA-rated R, for language and violence) loses a chance to haunt the mind afterwards, as “Cul-De-Sac” and “Repulsion” did, it still shows us a brilliant film maker using some of the best tricks in his deadly arsenal. At its best, it conveys all the desperation and giddiness of a man racing through a dark maze as his life unravels.

‘FRANTIC’

A Warner Brothers release. Producers Thom Mount, Tim Hampton. Director Roman Polanski. Script Gerard Brach, Polanski. Music Ennio Morricone. Editor Sam O’Steen. Camera Witold Sobocinski. Production designer Pierre Guffroy. With Harrison Ford, Emmanuelle Seigner, Betty Buckley, John Mahoney.

Running time: 2 hours, 11 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (younger than 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).