Cul-de-sac · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man is discovered in his wife's nightdress with makeup on. Two wounded gangsters are crawling up the beach toward his castle, and neither George nor the film treats the costume as a crisis. He will be humiliated many more times in the next ninety minutes and none of it will be news to him. The intruders don't create his condition. They just get him an audience.

Everything conventional about Cul-de-sac is in the armature: a house, intruders, a deadline, a boss coming to sort it out. Polanski and Gérard Brach built that chassis correctly, wrote it in Paris as If Katelbach Comes, and then declined to start the engine.

Consider what they disconnected. Deleuze's name for how classical cinema runs is the action-image: someone perceives a situation, is affected by it, and acts to change it, and the act closes the loop so the world at the end is not the world at the start. He calls that chain sensory-motor. A hostage picture is the chain in its purest commercial form. Somebody will do something and it will count.

In Cul-de-sac every part is present and nothing is connected. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. Richard has the gun and becomes a housemaid. George has the house and becomes a giggling accomplice. MacGowran's gangster is dying through most of his screen time. When violence finally arrives it comes inverted, the gunman shot by the weakest person present, and it changes nothing. Teresa leaves. The tide comes in.

Why reach for Deleuze when "Beckett at the seaside" is available and shorter? Because the literary account makes the flatness a borrowing, something imported from the theatre along with Pleasence and MacGowran. It isn't imported. It is built out of lenses, cutting, and a tide table.

Watch what carries the film once action stops carrying it. First, duration. McIntyre lets scenes run past the point where their business is finished, into the dead air where embarrassment lives. Deleuze's term for those stretches is dead time: passages that advance nothing and hold the ordinary anyway. Nearly all the comedy is a function of that holding. The showpiece is the beach sequence in the last act, a sustained take reported at around eight minutes in which the whole ensemble reshuffles its alliances and its public humiliations without a cut. Bazin argued that the long take in deep focus was an ethical instrument: it leaves the viewer free inside an ambiguous real. Polanski uses Bazin's grammar as punishment. Nobody can be cut away from. The editor is withdrawn as an instrument of mercy.

Second, bodies. With action gone, what remains on screen are postures, and the film reads them the way a thriller reads a plan. Deleuze calls this a cinema of the body, and he has a finer word for the single attitude that gives away a whole social relation: the gest. Cul-de-sac is built out of gests. The nightdress. The apron Richard is put into so he can be passed off as the servant when the visiting friends turn up. The shotgun everybody keeps forgetting to take seriously. Taylor's wide lenses and deep staging are what make them legible, holding every power position in one frame where a thriller would cut to shot and reverse. At any moment you can see the exact arrangement of the household. That is the information this film supplies in place of plot.

Then there is Katelbach, who never comes. Deleuze separates two kinds of off-screen. The relative out-of-field is the next room, the road behind the camera, somewhere you could walk. The absolute out-of-field is a somewhere with no location: it does not extend the set, it presses on it. Katelbach is that. Four people organise their entire conduct around a promise from a man who is not a place. The original title said so; the distributors' retitling made the joke merely geographical.

And the island. Holy Island is reached by a causeway the sea covers twice a day, so Polanski rented his premise rather than inventing it. In Taylor's high-contrast monochrome the sky, water, wet sand and whitewashed stone collapse into one narrow tonal band, and a person becomes a black mark on grey. Deleuze's term for a space that has stopped serving as a setting for action is the any-space-whatever, and its emptied variety, all luminance and no landmark, is what these flats become. Wind, gulls and sea run under every interior, so the house is never sealed; Komeda's jazz drifts over the degradation as though mourning a more romantic film. Beneath the Lutyens castle and its gentility another world keeps surfacing: hens, a shovel, a grave dug in sand, a car drowning. Deleuze would call the castle a derived milieu and that other thing an originary world, a place of appetite and slope where social position is worth nothing. Buñuel's cruelty, one of this film's legible debts, worked the same seam.

The last image settles the argument. George stands on a rock as the water rises, calling the name of his first wife. He has become what Deleuze calls a seer: someone with nothing available to him but looking and enduring. He does not move. The sea does. Deleuze has a name for that too, taken from the musical, where the dancer goes still and the world dances around him — the movement of world. The frame widens, the man shrinks, and the hydrology finishes the picture.

The craft debts are exact. The tidal-shore proscenium comes from Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), where the sea already did the work of the fourth wall. The master-and-servant business is The Fat and the Lean (1961), authority asserted through props and physical routine; the reversible hierarchy is the escalating gag of Mammals (1962) scaled to feature length and given words. Knife in the Water (1962) supplied the three-hander in wide-angle deep focus, all power positions legible at once, plus Komeda's jazz that comments instead of underlining. Repulsion (1965) supplied the unit — Taylor, McIntyre, Voytek's dilapidated interiors — with the subjective distortion cooled into observation. Pleasence brought Davies over whole from The Caretaker.

Downstream, every confined-space picture Polanski made afterwards runs this method, from The Tenant to Carnage and Venus in Fur, and the couple-plus-intruder returns in Bitter Moon. Further out sits the British strain that drops criminals into landscapes which make them ridiculous, Sexy Beast and Wheatley's rural comedies of violence, though critics assert that line more often than the filmmakers document it.

The significance is a permission. Genre structure can be scaffolding. You can build the thriller properly, on a small budget, with the deadline and the gun in place, then decline to resolve it, and it will still hold for ninety minutes on duration and humiliation alone. Much of art-inflected genre filmmaking since has run on that permission. The film won the Golden Bear and lost money, which is about what you would expect.

One thing to take back in with you. Everyone in this house has stalled except Teresa. Bored, contemptuous, the only one of the four who acts decisively, and the only one who gets off the island. Watch her next time instead of George. She may be the single character who has worked out what kind of film she is in.