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Rosemary’s Baby

Cast: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Sidney Blackmer, Ruth Gordon Director: Roman Polanski Writer: Roman Polanski (from a novel by Ira Levin) DVD: Rs. 499

This 1968 film is a classic study of every expectant mother’s worst nightmare. A wonderful study of paranoia, Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” is also a poignant reminder of the best and worst of the Swinging Sixties. Considering the fact that Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered a year later, gives the film an eerie resonance.

Polanski made his Hollywood debut with this film about modern-day witches and satanic rituals. Newly-married couple Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They become acquainted with an old couple living next door, Minnie and Roman Castevet.

Guy is a struggling actor, however, soon he gets an important part after the actor chosen for it goes inexplicably blind. Soon after Rosemary becomes pregnant and she feels her husband with her strange neighbours are involving her and the unborn child in a demonic plot.

The beauty of “Rosemary’s Baby” is it is so understated. For a horror film, there is practically no gore, no blood, no special effects — just an oppressive feeling of impending doom as tension is ratcheted to practically unbearable levels.

Polanski deliberately chooses an open-ended concluding act. So we never know if the whole plot is a figment of Rosemary’s post-partum depression or whether there really is a plot at all. The horrifying ending where we never see the baby, just the terror on Rosemary’s face and her shocked “what have they done to his eyes?” is chilling.

The movie like any good thriller is not about shocking twists and turns. It is not about some adroit conjuring trick the film maker pulls out of his hat. We know fairly early that there is something dodgy about and also the truth about the baby. The film works spectacularly because of Polanski’s skill in setting the mood and tempo and also because of the wonderful cast.

Mia Farrow, who has not the first choice for Rosemary, draws our eye and hearts keeps it and we suffer with her and hope against hope that Rosemary and her baby would be safe. It is the emotions we invest in the characters that makes us care what happens to them. Ruth Gordon, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the frighteningly jolly Minnie Castavet is also brilliant as are Sidney Blackmer as Roman and John Cassavetes as Guy.

The extras include retrospective interviews with Polanski, production executive Robert Evans and production designer Richard Sylbert. Polanski says when he read the book, he thought it started off like a soap opera and that was the mood of the movie also at the beginning. While there is a dark bird in the opening shot, there is this whole “Doris Day” like ambience as Blackmer describes it. With the city of New York being a character in the film, it fell to Sylbert, to find visuals for the text which he did spectacularly.

Polanski also talks of the casting and how he originally imagined Rosemary to be a healthy, all American girl but then was convinced to cast Mia Farrow who with her vulnerability bought a special resonance to the role. For Guy, Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson were suggested.

There is also a featurette on the making of “Rosemary’s Baby” with interviews with Polanski and Farrow. The shots of Farrow painting love and peace on her trailer and skipping and dancing with gay abandon accurately captures the zeitgeist of the time.

The movie also with its television commercials of Yamaha (Guy does a lot of TV work) and mention of the famous Vidal Sassoon haircut is a wonderful social, political, and historical document.

At time of the in-your-face, brutal, sadistic, torture porn, that horror movies have turned into these days, “Rosemary’s Baby” stands tall as enduring statement of the triumph of minimalism.

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