ROSEMARY’S BABY B+
USA (136 mi) 1968 d: Roman Polanski
Fresh from her lurid role in the immensely popular but trashy night time soap opera of Peyton Place (1964 – 1969), Mia Farrow’s fame from her role as the introverted Allison Mackenzie just took off afterwards, where intense interest in her offscreen marriage to Frank Sinatra (thirty years older!!!) became tabloid fodder. But after two years of trying to get out of her contract, she used his clout to finally get released from the show. When she refused to quit her role in ROSEMARY’S BABY to work in his forgettable film THE DETECTIVE (1968), Sinatra served her divorce papers on the set, though years later he did offer to have Woody Allen’s legs broken during their highly contentious divorce where Allen ended up sleeping with and ultimately marrying Farrow’s adopted daughter. All of this is simply background information for the abundantly youthful character she plays in this film, a beautiful wide-eyed innocent who is the picture of joy, but who eventually transforms to an older, more cautiously wiser woman who spits in the face of her husband (John Cassavetes). Shot in that loopy, early 60’s style, the opening credits have that ultra colorful Hullabaloo TV show look, using light pastels to project a world that is all cheerful and bright. But when Satanic chants can be heard through the walls of their overly spacious New York apartment, followed by a young woman in the building who falls over a balcony to her death, the audience suspects something a little creepy is going on in that building. Made by the director of REPULSION (1965), which features a similar eerie psychological transformation by the stunningly gorgeous Catherine Deneuve who grows delusional when left alone inside an apartment, but here Farrow’s flashback-style delusional dreams slowly become her reality, where she is left alone to contend with and ultimately embrace a hellish nightmare that becomes her life, with no possible way out. This from a man whose wife (Sharon Tate) was stabbed a year later more than a dozen times in a brutal murder by the Charles Manson clan just weeks before she was expected to give birth. Somehow, all the melodramatic hysteria and trauma surrounding Polanski’s real life comes front and center into this movie, where the audience is projecting all that information onto the screen to create their own nightmarish scenarios.
Knowing the salacious appetite of the public, Polanski, to his credit, slows the film down from the outset, showing the happy couple mired in the most mundane details of ordinary life, where they search for a new apartment, begin refurbishings, and meet their new neighbors down the hall, where being sociable starts becoming a chore, especially for Rosemary who finds the continual intrusions draining, especially the extreme familiarity immediately established from wrinkled, overly made up Ruth Gordon, the diminutive elderly neighbor who takes bad taste and being nosy to an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Because of how eerily uncomfortable she makes you feel with each successive appearance, growing more forward over time and more menacing, her role has become iconic. Her husband, meanwhile (Sidney Blackmer), is a smooth talking man of the world, seemingly a perfect gentleman, though both hide under the shroud of normalcy where no one would suspect they were involved with foul play. That Rosemary’s husband would take such an interest in their company is something of a surprise, as it is his love and fidelity that she is counting on, especially when she decides to get pregnant, which they turn into an intimate night alone. But that all changes when Rosemary is drugged, leading into a creepy hallucination sequence where a figment of her imagination that she is being held captive by a coven of naked Satan worshippers becomes stunning real, especially when she is raped by Satan himself, all mysteriously forgotten by the next morning except for the marks left on her body. While this is bizarre enough, Cassavetes takes no interest whatsoever in his wife’s condition, constantly making excuses for his mind being elsewhere, when out of nowhere, an actor with a lead role Cassavetes covets is suddenly struck blind, making the part instantly available for him. His sudden success is staggering, as it matches his indifference to Rosemary who is swooning in a delirium of confusion and forced isolation. Ruth Gordon is behind a gift of jewelry for Rosemary which contains a bizarre and foul smelling root, also a sudden switch in doctors, and an herbal concoction that she is to drink daily. All involved ignore the serious labor pains she undergoes, everyone calmly reminding her that this is “normal.”
Rosemary undergoes a radical shift in her appearance, cutting her long hair to a short pixie cut, which everyone around her immediately finds ugly and a terrible mistake. It’s clear she’s entering new territory, constantly guarded by Gordon or one of her friends, presumably for her health and safety, but all avenues to the outside world are eventually shut leaving Rosemary completely alone. Like Deneuve in REPULSION, Rosemary suffers an internal crisis of anxiety, where she’s tempted by the thought of the conspiring witches from her dreams, but she soon dispels these notions, finding them too incredible. But as Polanski continues to lay out new clues, she is repeatedly lured back to the same suspicions, that literally everyone has been lying to her to cover up dark and insidious practices. How this can happen in the modern era seems incredulous, but Rosemary’s journey only grows more deliriously feverish as she has nowhere to turn, becoming a psychological nightmare with no relief. The pressure on her shoulders is enormous, but she carries this weight with tremendous tact and intelligence, even as she is outnumbered and outmaneuvered. What she discovers is that the nightmare is real, that deception is the reality, that there is nowhere to turn, in short, that she has been deceived in order to deliver the devil’s child. Despite this horrific discovery, it still leaves her few options, as the Satanists eventually reveal themselves for what they are, and her husband for the dolt that he is for making a deal with the devil, and they have taken root in her building where she is perched near the top like a bird in a nest, only without the needed wings to fly away. She remains doomed to a life of unending torment, controlled by the powers that be, where the idea of motherhood in captivity becomes synonymous with David Lynch’s creepy industrialized black & white vision of parenthood in ERASERHEAD (1976).
