Give me back my wife!

 FRANTIC (1988)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

(Viewed back in theaters in 1988)

Despite its stirring title, "Frantic" is not a highly tense thriller with high-tech thrills every second. This is an absorbing, slower-paced thriller where the thrills come out of the situations rather than replacing them. Released back in 1988, it was also evidence that Roman Polanski was back at his claustrophobic best.

Harrison Ford plays Dr. Richard Walker who is in Paris for a medical convention with his wife, Sondra (Betty Buckley) - they are in the city where they spent their honeymoon. Richard and Walker stay at a luxurious hotel. They plan a romantic time together. Problems arise when Sondra discovers she picked up the wrong suitcase at the airport. While Richard takes a shower, Sondra disappears. Nobody has seen her except the hotel clerk who claims she left with a Middle-Eastern gentleman. This leads Richard to the underworld of Paris which includes gangsters, drug dealers, drug couriers, nightclubs, murder and a nuclear device! Of course, Richard could care less about any of this - he just wants his wife back. His guide through this mess is a leather-jacketed drug courier named Michelle (Emanuelle Seigner) who loves the music of Grace Jones. Walker prefers old music. Nevertheless, they develop a mutual need to help each other though one feels that Michelle is only interested in her fee of 10,000 francs for the missing suitcase.

"Frantic" develops slowly with a sure hand in every scene. Polanski tightens the suspense wires ever so delicately and he gets enormous help from Harrison Ford. Ford is in every scene and gives us a character we can identify with, the Everyman in a world he can't understand or has refused to acknowledge. Just because he is an apolitical American doctor doesn't mean he can find his wife with the dubious help of the police and the French Embassy. The frantic, unpredictable search is due to Polanski and Gerald Brach's devious screenplay which plays tricks with the audience - they do not give away too much so that we only know as much as Ford does from moment to moment. But Polanski shares a trait with another Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, in his ability to concentrate on characters and their motivations regardless of the plot. The nuclear device is the MacGuffin of the plot, which means it is the object the characters are interested in yet the audience could care less about.

"Frantic" is an unusual kind of thriller. It is chock full of suspense, it has some slapstick, plenty of black humor and the typical Polanski changes in his characters who are slowly coming apart. Consider the sequence where Ford's Walker arrives sans shoes at the hotel. Also consider a later scene where Richard and embassy officials are sprayed with some mace by Michelle, resulting in a comical sequence that Charlie Chaplin would have been proud of. The briefly suspenseful sequences of seeing Richard walking on the Paris rooftops reminds one of Hitch's "To Catch A Thief" but it also works because we care what happens to Richard Walker. Ford has no bullwhip or revolver this time, just his smarts and his bewilderment knowing his own life could be in danger.

"Frantic" is not a great Polanski film but it is a great example of how to make a thriller. Polanski's European feel for Paris and for its surroundings exude the kind of claustrophobia you can only feel in the hands of a real master. And Ford proves once again he is not just an action star.