Country: United States
Genre: Action/ Suspense/ Drama
Director: Roman Polanski
Year: 1988
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
We get to know Dr. Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) and his wife Sondra (Betty Buckley), as they drive in a taxi from a Paris airport to their hotel, as they order room service and so on, more or less in real time. Without seeming to do much of anything, screenwriters Gérard Brach and Roman Polanski give us a portrait of a successful, longstanding marriage. Each partner lets the other take responsibility for the tasks they are best at without any fuss. These two are so comfortable with each other that they can sit in silence, bicker, or be silly, without any fear or discomfort. When Sondra disappears while Richard is taking a shower, at first Richard is puzzled. Gradually, his alarm grows until he’s holding down panic. We get it. For Richard, losing Sondra is like losing his right hand.
Richard talks to the management of the hotel, to security. He goes to the French police, and then to the American Embassy. We feel his helplessness, that he’s moorless in a foreign country where he doesn’t speak the language.
In the first 40 minutes of Frantic, nothing much happens, but that’s okay. The screenwriters and director Roman Polanski make the movie so real that it’s easy to stand in Richard’s shoes and feel his anxiety. In fact, as things start happening and Arabs and nuclear devices start showing up, the movie steadily gets less suspenseful because it becomes more artificial, farther removed from quotidian reality. You get the feeling that the writers know an awful lot about marriage and not a whole lot about secret agents, other than what they learned by watching old Alfred Hitchcock flicks.
But I don’t want to put down Frantic. The scenario remains logical even though it steadily becomes more farfetched. The movie is still entertaining, but instead of having the rich fabric of real life, Frantic turns into an admittedly entertaining genre piece. The twists and turns are fun, there’s a bravura sequence on a Paris rooftop, and the relationship between Richard and Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner), a young drug courier, changes in amusing ways.
When Richard first meets Michelle, he just sees her as an irresponsible alleycat who helped to put his wife in danger, but almost imperceptibly, he develops fatherly feelings for her, while she starts having amorous feelings for him. There’s a charmingly awkward scene where Michelle pulls Richard onto a nightclub dance floor and writhes around him seductively while he looks increasingly uncomfortable.
While the tone of Frantic lightens considerably from the almost unbearably tense opening 40 minutes, it’s still a lot of fun.
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