Death and The Maiden - film vs. text comparison

A detailed Summary of Death and The Maiden - film vs. text comparison

The Polanski film Death and the Maiden is a wonderful and intelligent interpretation of Ariel Dorfman's human rights problem play. Polanski has produced, in this film, an exceptional piece of direction, in which his own personal, emotional input is evident. The main theme of the play is an extremely personal one for both playwright (and scriptwriter) and director. Both Dorfman and Polanski have had to face and flee the horrors of dictatorship and human rights violations: Dorfman in Chile, under General Augusto Pinochet, and Polanski in Poland under the Nazis. But despite this similarity in past experience, significant differences exist between the original play and the film. Apart from the specific techniques of lighting and composition, whose possibilities are greatly widened in the medium of film, we see differences in both the different emphases and implied viewpoints on the various themes that the play touches on and, perhaps more importantly, the way the characters are portrayed.

While the old concept of "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is present in both the play and the film (particularly in the characterisation of Paulina), it is much more prevalent in the movie. We can see Paulina's strength from the start.

Unlike Dorfman's play, Polanski does not try to make us accept, without a struggle, the simple truth that to victimize our tormentors is to sink to their level. We get the general feeling that Polanski is much more sympathetic to Paulina and the type of justice her injuries call out for. In Polanski's film adaptation, far from being driven by blind rage, Paulina is the only character that takes responsibility for her own actions, and cares little for the self-interested considerations of consequences. She has already faced the worst consequences possible, and seems, by that experience, to have acquired a terrifying emancipation from the restraints they can impose. While Dorfman gives Gerardo's logical pragmatism some credence, casting him as the voice of reason, for Polanski he stands for the blissfully unaware certainty of principles untested by experience. Gerardo's cliched maxims are the luxuries of a man who has never faced the reality of his enemy's power.

However, the film is not a justification of Paulina's actions, a simple revenge fantasy. Despite the satisfaction of Paulina's brand of justice, she can't, when faced with Roberto's honest confession and the fact that he too is human and has his own reasons for doing what he did, push herself to kill him. In fact I am not sure that killing him was her intention when she lead him to the cliff, she understood the almost unbearably painful truth when she first decided that "...no revenge [could] satisfy [her]..." For all the rage contained in the film (significantly more than the play), and its portrayal of Paulina, there is a certain helplessness to the film, and a disturbing truth in its un

Some common words found in the essay are:
Paulina Paulina, Poland Nazis, Dorfman Gerardo's, Paulina Fury, Polanski Roberto, Polanski's Paulina, Unlike Dorfman's, Ariel Dorfman's, Roberto Miranda's, Dorfman Polanski, play film, play polanski, phallic symbol, human rights,

Approximate Word count = 1119
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English