When Desire Turns Dangerous – The Strange Seduction of Bitter Moon
While some films attempt to frame and capture the ideal vision of love, others take the twined feelings of passion and pain and dissect them. For those of us driven by such masochistic visions, Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992) provides us one of the most haunting explorations of a tale where desire turns to obsession, and love becomes cruelty. What appears as a sensual psychological drama unravels, more disturbingly, in the form of a confession – primarily, a human confession that draws not just the film’s characters, but the artists who lived those characters as well.
A Cruise into Madness
Bitter Moon’s story begins on a luxurious cruise ship traveling to Istanbul. Nigel (Hugh Grant) and wife Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas) meet a flamboyant, disabled American writer, Oscar (Peter Coyote), and his enigmatic partner, Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner). As Oscar describes his youth and passion, and brutalizing love of Mimi, a simple dinner exchange grows into a disturbing cruise of desire and degradation.
Flashbacks reveal the origin of a fateful romance in Paris. Mimi transforms the life of Oscar, a struggling writer, before she becomes his lover. Their love becomes all-consuming and dangerous. It is a tale of infatuation turned dominative. There is a cruel, possessive love that becomes intensely violent. It is a perverse game of passion and power played endlessly and repetitively.
Bitter Moon is a cautionary tale, not a work of pornography. It is a tale of erotic love that turned abusive. It is a tale of love lost where, dispassionately, the lovers lost all sense of control, replacing love with control, passion with a cruel devotion, and ultimately, love with a devastating surrender.
Emmanuelle Seigner: When Life Imitates Art
Emmanuelle Seigner is a performer who embodies the unwavering and fragile. There is a heartbreaking sadness in the brutality of the disassemblage, a kind of emotional honesty that troubles the onlookers. Seigner plays a very interesting role in the histrionics of the tale. She was, is, and is married to Roman Polanski. She was in her mid-20s and had just married Polanski when she was filming Bitter Moon, who was more than 30 years her senior, and over 30 years, and who was her husband.
The emotional power dynamic and age difference in their marriage reflected the themes of the movie. The fans and critics alike were not able to avoid the striking similarity of Polanski directing his young wife in scenes of erotic subordination and emotional manipulation. Seigner however stated that she felt “completely free” and trusted Polanski “without reservation” and that was the other reason he was able to direct her so effectively.
One cannot simply ignore the cruelty with which the character Biwi Mimi was treated and the emotional consumption and reshaping to meet the expectations of her lover was reflected in the art with the obsession of control that Polanski and other artists, and even Seigner, were accused of. Seigner revealed that filming some of the movie’s most intense scenes made her feel so emotionally drained that it felt she was ‘shedding layers’ after each scene.
Hugh Grant and the Bitter Moon
Before the Four Weddings and a Funeral brought him global fame, Hugh Grant acted in Bitter Moon. Back then, he had the reputation of a gentle, comedic English actor. But for Polanski, he perceived Grant to be something darker. Perhaps, that repressed fascination with the chaos of the undomesticated world. Nigel, the character Grant played, was bemused and terrified by the wildness in Oscar and Mimi.
Reportedly, Grant had difficulties portraying the character’s restraint. During the shoot, he said it was “difficult to play a man who says so little yet feels so much.” But that very restraint is what makes Nigel believable. He is the spectator in all of us, watching forbidden love unfold.
In the early days of his off-screen career, Grant was taking unusual, albeit risky, roles that were far removed from the romantic comedies for which he later became famous. Bitter Moon, for which he was willing to morph to something terribly wrong and morally indefensible, remains a rare window, one that mocks the all too polite Englishness for which he became globally famous.
Peter Coyote’s Tragic Intensity
Peter Coyote is the soul — and the sickness — of Bitter Moon. He has been described as having a ‘cynical charm’ and a ‘raspy voice’ that ‘turns every monologue into a confession booth.’ Coyote’s Oscar is repellent and yet magnetic — a failed writer still drowning in his own fantasies.
Coyote’s transformations can also be described as dramatic. He was heavily involved in the San Francisco counterculture of the 1960s and later ‘rebellions.’ He understood the ‘excess’ that was a part of the Oscar’s character. Excess was probably the right word to describe the Oscar character in Bitter Moon ‘A man who romanticizes freedom but is really trapped by his own chains.’
There is a history of Coyote, ‘behind the scenes’ as well. He was known for ‘creating the intensity’. He wanted to ‘humanize the vulnerability’ of Oscar, while Polanski wanted to’ exploit the grotesque.’ This was reflected in the tension that gave disturbing realism to Oscar — a man who abuses in ordinality not malice.
Between Voyeurism and Vulnerability
Roman Polanski’s direction in Bitter Moon is unflinching. The camera doesn’t shy away or cut from the ugly side of love. It fixates and forces the audience to confront their own love, pleasure, and guilt. Many critics in 1992 dismissed it as “too excessive” or “self-indulgent,” but the film gained a cult following for refusing to moralize.
The unpleasantness of the film’s eroticism is deliberate. The humiliation scenes, as with all the other scenes, are filmed with an unflinching, clinical detachment that strips away the eroticism to reveal and center the emotional devastation. While one may see this as a negative attribute, it stands as the film’s greatest strength.
Many of the crew have since come out with the specific, and at best, odd, instruction Polanski would give to the actors. He would insist upon long, unbroken takes, not for the film’s pacing, but to “trap” actors in emotionally draining scenes. An example that stands out is Seigner’s breakdown in the bathroom. It was not a performance, but an emotional collapse after Polanski, as he was known to do, kept rolling. The real exhaustion after multiple takes is evident in the film.
The Residual Effect of Bitter Moon
Although Bitter Moon did not achieve successful box office results, the film evokes powerful and lingering effects. It turned into the sort of film that people spoke of only in whispers, recommending it under the condition that one “be in the mood for it.” It explored the multiple facets of love and showed how romance, devoid of sentiment, becomes a slow, self-destructive spiral.
The film also left permanent scars on the actors. It was on Seigner’s casting that people first spoke of bold European sexuality. Grant discovered how to wield restraint as a form of power, while Coyote was able to demonstrate that he was a depth beyond the stereotypes that Hollywood had placed on him. And Polanski, the most disputed, made a work that was a mirror to his life: beautiful, unsettling and life-threatening.
A Love Story That Hurts to Remember
Even now, watching Bitter Moon is taking a wrong step and reading a private diary. It is also all of these adjectives: devoid of order, personal, and painfully honest. In each character, in every scene there is shame and longing. Desire and ego form the sad concoction of. catastrophic potential reminiscent of a whisper in each scene.
This may explain why it endures — not merely as an erotic thriller, but as a painfully honest confession illustrating the ways in which people love and destroy each other. For once, the reel and the real were not separate realms — they were one and the same, and it was bitter, beautiful, and unforgettable.