MOVIES : All Grown Up . . . at 60 : After years of indulgence, what else is there besides sex and the pursuit of pleasure that makes life worth living? You could ask the exiled filmmaker--and recent father--but you may not like his answer

“It’s very difficult to explain to people who don’t have children,” says enfant terrible -turned-new father Roman Polanski. “It’s like trying to explain to a child what it’s like to make love. What do you say, it’s like ice cream but 10 times better?”

Can this really be Roman the Terrible sounding like any middle-class dad? Polanski is one of those icons of pop culture that rattle around in our collective consciousness. His personal history reads like one long tabloid headline. The Nazi occupation of Poland when he was a child; the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson family when she was nine months pregnant; the raging libido that led him to flee the United States rather than face sentencing for having sex with a 13-year-old Los Angeles girl in 1977. He acknowledged in his 1984 autobiography that people see him as an “evil, profligate dwarf.” So when Polanski starts talking about children as the only tangible and lasting expression of love between two people, one can hardly believe one’s ears. After all the Sturm und Drang , Polanski’s answer to getting older is as tame as what many of his contemporaries in Hollywood have devised: raising a family.

“Roman always struck me as having a lot more conventional values than was generally perceived,” suggests longtime pal Jack Nicholson, himself the father of two young children. “He’s kind of an old-style Continental gentleman. I’ve always been at strong odds with his public image.”

At 60, Polanski may have matured, but he hasn’t mellowed. Having settled into a kind of domestic contentment with his 28-year-old wife and leading lady, Emmanuelle Seigner, and their year-old daughter, Morgane, he says there are now more important things in his life than making movies. Part of his disillusionment with filmmaking is a reaction to years of disappointment trying to find and finance projects from his adopted home of Paris.

At his best with films like “Knife in the Water,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown,” Polanski was one of the most gifted filmmakers of his generation. The tragedy of his exile is that he has made only four films since leaving the United States in 1977. Polanski insists that he gets offers from American studios “but it’s usually something so debasing that I can’t possibly accept it. I know there are certain action pictures I could easily give some class but very few, and they are usually developed from the start by someone who has more access. Kubrick is at the same disadvantage living in England. Look how few films he makes.”

Polanski’s latest film, “Bitter Moon,” finally opens in Los Angeles on Friday after sitting on the shelf for more than a year waiting for an American distributor. “Sometimes I ask myself if it’s worth it. One wastes so much time to pull all the strings together. I have been weary of it for a long time, but now it is past all limits,” the director says over oysters one night in a favorite hangout.

For Polanski, “Bitter Moon” is a transitional film about getting older and coming to terms with the excesses of youth.

The film, set on a cruise from Venice to Istanbul, creates a whirlpool of twisted love in which one couple (Peter Coyote and Seigner) devours itself while drawing a staid English couple (Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott-Thomas) into a storm of sex and self-destruction. The film has the physicality of a young man’s work but also the perspective of someone who has gained something from experience.

But one can’t help wondering if Polanski’s personal growth and newfound contentment are beneficial to an artist who has fashioned a body of work based on the treachery of relationships. For all its sexual intensity, “Bitter Moon” comes to some rather traditional conclusions about love and obsession.

In early drafts of the “Bitter Moon” screenplay, written by Polanski with Gerard Brach and John Brownjohn, based on Pascal Bruckner’s novel, the action was even more explicit. The film has received a mixed reception in Europe, and Polanski acknowledges that some people didn’t know they were allowed to laugh at scenes of domination and degradation. He hopes an American audience will get what he calls the black humor of the film better than the French who, he says, don’t understand irony and satire.

“There’s nothing really that controversial, nothing that explicit in this film. I don’t show frontal nudity; I find it boring. It’s just the tone of the film that may shock the weak at heart,” the director explains.

Given Polanski’s history, the temptation to draw parallels between his life and a tale of predatory sex is irresistible. Unfortunately, he won’t have any of it. He greets such suggestions with a mixture of impatience, denial and clowning. This is clearly an area he does not care to examine, privately or publicly.

Yet the similarities are tantalizing. Friends say that the central relationship in “Bitter Moon,” with its bickering and power struggle, is, in spirit, a mirror of his relationship with Seigner. A longtime associate describes the construction of the film as a theater within a theater in which Polanski plays out some of the drama of his own life. Whether it is true or not, people will see the film as a firsthand report from a battle zone most of them have never visited.

Youthfulness is perhaps Polanski’s greatest creation. For years he has resisted the impulse to grow up. It is his way of defying the rules. Pinned to his green nylon bomber jacket is a likeness of Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice. With its pointy nose, impish grin and diminutive stature, it is a figure that bears a striking resemblance to the director. Polanski stands just a few inches over five feet. His wild hair and the ring in his left ear give him a boy’s appearance to go with his young man’s body. His films have consistently reflected Polish street punk attitude and the charged sexuality of a hormone-crazed kid. Even more startling is how his face can transform in an instant to show his years, a walking Dorian Gray. It’s as if he carries both men within him and by sheer will keeps his older self bottled.

As a child fleeing the Nazis after his parents had been taken to Auschwitz, Polanski hid out with Polish pig farmers in the countryside, pretending he was not Jewish. German soldiers fired at him for sport. Perhaps Polanski had seen enough for a lifetime and somewhere deep inside decided to stop growing emotionally simply as a way to survive--to become invulnerable.

In a piece about Polanski written more than 20 years ago, his friend Kenneth Tynan related a story that even then demonstrated Polanski’s refusal to believe that one day his physical powers would erode. A man in his mid-40s whom Polanski knew was experiencing migraines. Polanski was impatient, as he often is with things that don’t obey his idea of how they should be.

“What’s wrong with you, you used to be such a healthy bugger? Is it male menopause?”

“I suppose so.”

“Will that happen to me?”

“Yes.”

“Up your arse,” Polanski replied. “It’s all psychological.”

When Polanski is reminded of the story, he proudly proclaims, “Well, it hasn’t yet.”

Humor is Polanski’s other great defense. He delights in telling bad jokes and pulling pranks. With his buddy Nicholson he orchestrated a grand practical joke on the Paris set of “Bitter Moon.” In one of the film’s raciest scenes, Coyote is crawling around wearing only a G-string and a pig’s snout. When he looked up to deliver his lines to Seigner, he was stunned to find himself cheek to jowl with Nicholson.

Ask Polanski a tough personal question and you are likely to get a joke in return. If life, as he believes, is made up of tragedy and farce, Polanski will choose farce every time. “Even at the funeral of someone very dear to you,” he says, “if you see the priest slipping on the mat and falling on his face, it will make you laugh.”

Having a good time has always been more important to Polanski than morbid thoughts of his own demise. He skis and drives like a maniac and took boxing lessons a few years ago. Some friends wonder why he chooses to spend time with people who clearly don’t challenge him in any way. Many of the women Polanski has been involved with, among them Catherine Deneuve and Nastassja Kinski, were archetypal innocents unspoiled by experience.

“Roman is into total control and ties into women who like to be controlled,” says Polanski’s sometime editor Sam O’Steen. “Emmanuelle’s certainly that way. She likes to be molded.”

Seigner acknowledges that she sees little of her husband’s dark side spilling over from his films to his everyday life: “I don’t ask why, if he’s a happy person, his films are so dark. I’m not very intellectual; I try not to masturbate my brain. Just leave it, try to enjoy it the most. We’re going to die anyway.”

Polanski says fatherhood hasn’t changed his life very much, except that he stays home a little more now. He is amused by friends who for years did nothing but run from one disco to another and now whip out their wallets to show baby pictures. Still, when friends visit him in Paris he gives them the grand night-life tour of clubs spilling over with young women. They go home happy, he says, thinking, “Ah, this is Polanski’s Paris.” Polanski’s outrageousness has served him well over the years; it puts people on the defensive and deflects closer examination. It is really only in the last few years that he has started to slowly and selectively show another side.

Part of the change is aging, inevitable even for him. At dinner one night, Polanski is rubbing his hip and complaining of various aches and pains. The prolonged illness leading to the death of his father several years ago from cancer made him consider his own mortality: “All of a sudden you realize that the remote light at the end of the tunnel is the train going in the opposite direction.”

The tenor of Polanski’s emotional life seems to have been set by his relationship with his father.

“He never really gave me any physical signs of affection,” he says, “except the time when he returned from the concentration camp and took me on his knee.” This made a deep, lifelong impression on Polanski, who grew up being “very discreet about my feelings and who I would expose them to.”

If Polanski is just learning to show affection for his friends, the big change started with his marriage in August, 1989, to Seigner, the granddaughter of French actor Louis Seigner. He started seeing her when she was 18.

“When I met him, he was very lonely,” she says. “He had no one. It was a bit sad for him going from one girl to another.”

Like the sexual kamikaze he has created in “Bitter Moon,” there doesn’t seem to be much that Polanski hasn’t tried. By the end of the film, the character played by Coyote is like an old junkie who is addicted to new thrills but can no longer get his fix--he’s hit a wall.

“I never went that far,” Polanski says, “but I came close. I never thought, ‘I want to live on the edge.’ I was just following my desires.”

Although Polanski consistently dodges the topic, “Bitter Moon” poses questions he seems ready to address in his own life. After years of indulgence, what else is there besides sex and the pursuit of pleasure that makes life worth living? The problem of how to sustain a relationship after the initial sexual fireworks have gone off is not exactly revolutionary territory, but to see how one of the great libertines of our times grapples with the question is both ironic and amusing. He recognizes the absurdity of the situation.

“I don’t know what the answer is for anyone else,” he says rather sheepishly. “And I’m not one to give advice about how to deal with attractions outside of marriage.”

It is surprising to realize that for all of its raciness, “Bitter Moon” is really something of a morality play, a point that is likely to be obscured by the unabashed sexuality of the material and the glare of Polanski’s past. It is his first film to offer a ray of hope at the end, instead of his usual cul-de-sac. But anyone who can dress his wife in a leather harness, put a whip in her hand and put her on screen hasn’t gone totally respectable. Asked if he would consider directing a real romance, he says sure--as long as the couple dies in the end.

In fact, Polanski’s next film, “Death and the Maiden,” which started shooting in Paris earlier this month, continues his claustrophobic examination of psychosexual tensions. Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley star in the adaptation of Ariel Dorfman’s play about a politician, his wife and the doctor who may have tortured her.

By necessity Polanski’s whole life has been a moving target, and he’s not about to stop now. Friends say that in the right light the scars of the past are still visible. When he’s bone tired and can’t run anymore, at odd hours of the night on the set, driving on a desert highway, he will talk about the past. But not often and certainly not to a stranger.

“Do you ever look back?”

“I don’t think I do . . . only to avoid mistakes.”

“What mistakes have you made?”

“Well, I’m not going to go into specifics trying to recall them. And not to enumerate to a journalist. You asked me if I looked back; I said only to avoid mistakes. Anybody who repeats mistakes and doesn’t learn is just plain stupid.”

* “Bitter Moon” opens Friday at the Nuart, Santa Monica Boulevard at the San Diego Freeway, West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379. In addition, the theater plans a retrospective of 15 of Polanski’s films, from today through Thursday, including “Dance of the Vampires,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Chinatown” and “The Tenant.” Call the theater for specific schedule information.