Frantic is a 1988 film directed by Roman Polanski and written by him, Gérard Brach, and Robert Towne. It stars Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner, with Betty Buckley, John Mahoney, and Yorgo Voyagis. Ennio Morricone wrote the film score.
The film was a box office disappointment, except for in countries like France, but it was a critical success. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 77% positive reaction, based on 43 reviews. Siskel and Ebert, though critical of aspects of it, gave it “two thumbs up.”
Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a transcript of the dialogue.
The film begins with Dr. Richard Walker (Ford) and his wife, Sondra (Buckley), in a cab going from the airport to their hotel in Paris. From San Francisco, they’re here because he has to do a medical conference (they also had their honeymoon here twenty years before). One normally associates a trip to France with the height of romance, but a business trip like this tends to deflate those feelings of excitement for a return to the place of one’s honeymoon.
What’s more, so much of Paris has changed since the last time the Walkers were here that it’s hard for him to rekindle those romantic feelings through nostalgia. The sky is grey and overcast. Their cab even gets a flat tire.
A shower and a sleep are all the jet-lagged husband and wife want when they get to their hotel room. He speaks as if he’s going to ride her like a stud when they’re in bed, to which she coolly replies, “Promises, promises.” Indeed, after years of marriage and a few kids, it’s hard [!] to imagine a rekindling of the embers of the old fires of passion.
Even worse, she picked up the wrong suitcase, something that will have huge significance later. Though she thinks he should have lunch with Dr. Maurice Alembert, a colleague, since she thinks the latter knows that she and Richard have arrived early enough for them to have lunch together, he doesn’t want to go, so averse is he to extending the business aspect of his trip to Paris. She wants Walker to give her a note she can use to contact Alembert about the lunch, but he’s so opposed to it that he eats the paper.
Walker calls their kids at home and finds out that there are worries over there, too. Somebody has called for Sondra…from Paris (more significance about this will come later), and their teen daughter, Casey, is on a date that night all of a sudden. All of these concerns just add to the atmosphere of a very non-gay Paree.
Walker takes a shower and shaves, and during this time, Sondra has put on a tight red dress and left their room without his knowing. When he realizes she’s gone, he assumes that she’s just stepped out for the moment. Room service has given both of them a meal. He lies on the bed and takes a nap.
When he wakes up, this is when his worries really begin to grow. Things aren’t dull any more.
It’s interesting that he slept before the excitement has begun. I’m not saying that the rest of the movie is a dream. I’m not about to describe what literally happens in Frantic, but rather what I feel is the symbolic meaning of what happens, from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Walker sleeps…perchance, to dream. And as Freud pointed out, “the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” This association, of Walker having a brief sleep, dreaming, and therefore his unconscious expressing itself, is sufficient in itself for my purposes here.
His trip to France, so far, has been one disappointment after another, one annoyance after another. He wants some excitement in his life, and he’s about to get it…whether he likes the form that excitement is about to come in, or not.
One of the chief things we need to understand about the unconscious is that it’s all about conflict. One part of the mind wants to do one thing, while another part of the mind wants to do something else. Part of Walker wants his wife back, of course…but another part of him wants to get rid of her.
Sure he loves her–there’s no doubt about that; but she’s getting older, and it’s common for married men his age–especially in romantic Paris–to have the seven-year itch and want to chase young women, as morally objectionable as that may be. He’s a strait-laced, conservative family man, but he’s also a handsome, successful doctor, the kind of man many young women would find attractive and see as a good catch.
Surely Walker is aware of how potentially appealing he must be, including to sexually appealing young women like Michelle (Seigner), so he must be feeling the temptation to cheat on Sondra while she’s gone. It doesn’t matter that he never ends up cheating on her–the point is that he feels the temptation, and part of what’s making him so…frantic…about finding Sondra as soon as he can is his wish to make impossible any more opportunities to cheat.
What we see in Walker is the classic manifestation of the id, the ego, and the superego. His id, to put it perfectly bluntly, wants to fuck Michelle’s brains out. His ego knows that jeopardizing his marriage, a divorce from which would probably mean losing custody of his kids, makes an affair out of the question. Yet even if he can get away with sleeping with Michelle while Sondra’s missing, and she never learns about his adultery, Walker–being the strait-laced, conservative man that he is–has a superego that would plague him with guilt over doing such a naughty thing…especially while his wife is being held for ransom!
So the events as they unfold in the film give him his adventure, while resolving the conflict between to do or not to do (Michelle). The girl helps him find his wife, there are a few sexy, suggestive moments between them, and he gets Sondra back physically unharmed, though having had a big scare. In short, Frantic is wish-fulfillment for Walker…though because of his conflicted feelings, it’s also a nightmare.
As he’s trying to get help from such people as the hotel management and the American embassy, it is suggested one or two times that Sondra may have sneaked away to have an affair of her own. After all, she changed into that red dress just before leaving the hotel. Walker, of course, is offended at the idea of his wife betraying him; yet in his unconscious, this betrayal could also be a wish-fulfillment for him, since it now allows him to fool around with a clear conscience. In Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise) has similar thoughts, and therefore similar temptations.
Now, it can be argued that, with his wife out of the picture for the moment, Walker in his unconscious thoughts can explore homosexual possibilities as well as heterosexual ones, as is suggested when he asks about “the good-looking guy” working at the hotel desk to see if he knows where Sondra went. This man is later found in a gym, exercising and lifting weights, so his muscle tone is clear to see through the T-shirt he works out in.
Of course, Walker doesn’t make advances on this “good-looking guy” any more than he does on Michelle, but that isn’t the point. In his unconscious thoughts–allowed to come out with fewer inhibitions while he’s in a drowsy state of jet lag–his id explores the possibilities while his ego rejects them as unrealistic and his superego morally condemns their very contemplation.
The adventure and excitement aren’t limited to sexual possibilities. There’s also the contemplation of doing drugs. In a bar called The Blue Parrot, Walker is looking for a man named Dédé Martin (played by Boll Boyer). He meets a Rastafarian there who intuits that he’s desperately looking for “the white lady.” While Walker assumes the Rastafarian is talking about Sondra, he really means cocaine, a sample of which he gives Walker to snort in a toilet stall in the bar’s washroom.
Now, of course Walker doesn’t want–in his conscious mind–to be high on cocaine while he’s searching for his wife, so he washes it out of his nose as soon as the Rastafarian leaves. His acceptance of “the white lady” up his nose for the moment, however, is only out of politeness on the conscious level; unconsciously, he’d love at least to give coke a try, so he resolves his conflict about it by having it up his nose briefly, then washing it away.
Mistakenly equating “the white lady” with Sondra also rationalizes his indulgence with the drug, however brief it may be. [Later, when Michelle is helping him and they’re in her car, she snorts a line of “the white lady”…until he angrily stops her from doing it. Again, there’s a brief indulgence in it (his id projected onto her), then his ego and superego stop it.]
Walker asks the Rastafarian to give him Dédé’s address, which he gets from Michelle at a table farther off in the bar; so Walker and Michelle, maybe, see each other ever so briefly, without thinking much of it. Her distinctive leather jacket and hat make her more recognizable to him than vice versa, but her recognizing him seems to have more significance when we consider her liking of a particular song by Grace Jones: “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango).”
Walker finds Dédé in his apartment with his throat cut. Michelle goes there at a later point, when Walker’s also there, and they meet right when she’s trying to process the shock of seeing Dédé’s body. She initially assumes Walker’s the killer, and she must be thinking that she’s seen his face before, him having asked the Rastafarian about Dédé’s whereabouts.
Now we can begin to understand the significance of the Grace Jones song as it relates to Michelle’s experiences of the plot of the movie. Walker isn’t “hanging ’round [her] door,” but rather Dédé’s; still, since Walker has accosted Michelle, frightening her in her already traumatized state upon having seen the corpse, he’s “like a hawk stealing for the prey,” as she imagines him.
Walker “shadows [Michelle] back home,” that is, he goes back to her apartment [his spastic crawling on the roof of which–with the suitcase–reflects his conflict over being with her vs resisting the temptation], because she mistakenly took Sondra’s luggage, and he needs to find out what’s in Michelle’s (which has been in his hotel room), to get what’s in it to exchange it with the kidnappers and get Sondra back.
What Grace Jones says in French sounds like something Michelle wants to say to Walker: “What are you looking for, meeting with death [i.e., Dédé’s corpse]? Who do you think you are [i.e., sticking your nose in my business]? Ah, you also hate life [i.e., your disappointing trip to France and your dull married life and work routine].”
Towards the end of the film, Walker and Michelle will “dance in bars and restaurants” (one in particular, called A Touch of Class, and they’ll dance to this song in particular). Before that, she’ll be “home with anyone who wants” to be there with her: namely, two Israeli agents who are also looking for what was smuggled in her luggage (a krytron), and later on, Walker will be there.
Michelle finds Walker “standing there alone” with “staring eyes” that “chill [her] to the bone,” because in spite of his conservative restraint, she–as an extremely desirable young woman–can sense that he wants to have her. His desire both scares and excites her. Indeed, she offers him plenty of opportunities to have her: in her apartment the first time, she changes shirts, being briefly topless and allowing him an opportunity to check her out; later, she gives him a peck on the cheek in his hotel room; and when she dances with him, she undulates seductively in a provocative red dress [!] that accentuates her curves.
Grace Jones’s next words in French seem, for the purposes of this movie, to be equating “Joël” with Walker; for he is in his hotel room with his suitcase (or Sondra’s, or Michelle’s, whichever). His hotel room has been ransacked by those trying to find the krytron, so he’s looking at his clothes, among other things lying all over the place. There are photos of Sondra that he’s used to help him find her; Michelle notices how happy his wife looks in one of them. The idea that he left without regret or melodrama sounds like irony or denial, since he slammed the door and stormed off.
Leaving Paris without regret or melodrama, while having also slammed the door of his hotel room and stormed off, sounds like his attempt at reconciling his unconscious wish to have an adventure without Sondra while consciously fearing for her life the whole time.
To continue discussing the events of Frantic as a symbolic expression of Walker’s thought processes, as I said above, Michelle changing her shirt in the bedroom of her apartment is such an example. While she’s briefly topless, he’s in her bathroom; he sees her and promptly closes the bathroom door. In his actions we can see him resolving his conflict of ‘to see, or not to see’ in this brief look and closing the door.
Not convinced that he secretly wants her? Later, he returns to her apartment with her suitcase (i.e., that clumsy entrance I mentioned above). Having sneaked through the bathroom window, and hearing her being questioned aggressively by the two Israeli agents, Walker gets naked and lies in her bed. He interrupts the interrogation, pretending to be her boyfriend; she goes along with it and sits on the bed with her arms around him.
He gets out of bed with only a stuffed animal to cover his groin. She’s standing behind him as he threatens one of the Israelis, giving her a clear view of his bare ass. Why the need to be nude, except as part of a wish to have a sexual relationship with her? His id wants him to be nude, while earlier, his superego closed the bathroom door.
In another scene earlier in the movie, Walker and Michelle are at the airport getting the suitcase, and they run into some old American colleagues of his, one of them–“Peter”–played by David Huddleston. Though nothing sexual is going on between Walker and Michelle, it must look that way to Peter and the other colleagues. The worried look on Walker’s face can be easily misconstrued as guilt, since the colleagues know Sondra…but in Walker’s unconscious, he really does feel guilty, not just worry that they’ll be gossiping about him and Michelle later.
In his hotel room with Michelle–and the French authorities and hotel staff are with him investigating his wife’s disappearance, since he knows the kidnappers will kill Sondra if he involves the cops–he gets rid of them by claiming he wants to be alone with Michelle, implying he’s having an affair with her, and also claiming they were right to think Sondra was also having an affair with someone. Again, on the surface, this is just an excuse to get rid of all of them; but unconsciously, he’d really like to be with her. He must have enjoyed her peck on his cheek.
To get back to the krytron, it’s hidden in, of all things, a statuette of the Statue of Liberty, which was in Michelle’s suitcase. How ironic it is that something used as a switch for a detonator for nuclear weapons has been put inside a symbol of ‘freedom.’
There’s a terrible fear of Arabs getting their hands on nukes (and Sondra’s kidnappers are Arabs, still routinely portrayed in movies of the time as villains); but the US created the first atomic bomb, and is the only country to have used nukes to kill people, yet we in the West don’t worry about American possession of nukes. France also has nuclear weapons, and while the Israeli government likes to keep to a policy of ‘deliberate ambiguity’ about having them, they most certainly have many.
The men at the American embassy (one of them played by Mahoney) are eager to get their hands on the krytron, as are the two Israeli agents, as if it would somehow be ‘safer’ in their hands. All Walker knows it that it’s the key to Sondra’s survival. To Michelle, as the smuggler of the krytron into France, it’s something she should have asked a lot more money for.
After a failed attempt to give the krytron to the kidnapper (Voyagis) in a parking lot to get Sondra back, Walker and the kidnapper agree to meet in A Touch of Class to arrange another exchange, this time, on the Île aux Cygnes. During Walker’s sexy dance with Michelle in that tight red dress, and Grace Jones is singing “I’ve seen that face before,” there are Arab men in the bar looking at him.
On the surface, Walker’s fearful face on the dance floor would seem to be because he thinks the watching Arabs are working with the kidnapper (lots of Arabs frequent A Touch of Class, as Michelle has remarked earlier), and that Sondra’s life is in their hands. On an unconscious level, though, Walker’s nervousness is really his guilt over dancing with Michelle while his wife’s in danger. He’s uncomfortable because he’s enjoying himself. When they walk into the bar, he politely says she looks nice; he’s really thinking that she looks hot.
The exchange on the Île aux Cygnes is next to the Paris replica of the Statue of Liberty. Recall the juxtaposition of an electronic detonator of nuclear weapons encased in a statuette of “Lady Liberty.” Now, the dangerous exchange of Sondra for that detonator is near another replica of “Lady Liberty.”
Just as there’s the paradox of fantasizing about an extramarital affair mixed with guilt over such thoughts, so is there the paradox of the ideal of democratic freedom mixed with coercion (the kidnapping) and the threat of using a weapon of mass destruction. A surface of goodness (marital fidelity, bourgeois democracy) hides the darkness inside us all (affair fantasies, ambitions of global imperialist dominance through nuclear deterrence).
Though Walker finally gets Sondra back, and it’s interesting to see both her and Michelle in those tight red dresses as they pass each other in the exchange, Michelle complicates the exchange by demanding payment from the kidnapper for having smuggled the krytron into France. A gunfight ensues, because the two Israeli agents arrive, demanding they hand over the krytron. In the struggle, Michelle is mortally wounded from a gunshot in the back from the pistol of the kidnapper, who’s been shot by one of the Israelis.
She puts the krytron in Walker’s pocket as she’s dying in his arms. The parallels between her and Sondra continue: where Sondra was in danger of being killed by the kidnapper, Michelle actually is killed by him. As she’s dying, Walker calls her “baby,” just as he was calling Sondra “babe” a number of times at the beginning of the film.
The point is that the second woman in a red dress has been a double for the first, having replaced her for a time. Now that Sondra is back, though, her appealing double is no longer needed in Walker’s unconscious fantasy world. His calling Michelle “baby” implies his wish, however unconscious, for her to be his new lover.
Siince all the Arabs are killed, the two Israelis approach Walker and Sondra for the krytron. He shows his contempt for them and their coveting of such a dangerous device, which has caused so much trauma and death, by throwing it into the Seine. The preoccupation with the krytron over human lives, a preoccupation on all political sides–American, Israeli, and Arab–as opposed to our sympathetic protagonist’s disregard for it, is meant to represent that old liberal “there’s bad on all sides” position on contentious political issues, a stance that ignores how there’s typically much more bad on one side (the US and Israel) than there is on the others (the Arabs and Soviets).
The movie ends with Walker and Sondra in a cab on their way out of Paris, paralleling their entrance into the city at the beginning. Where in the beginning, the couple were jet-lagged and bored, in the end, they’re emotionally scarred.
On the surface, those scars are from the scary kidnapping and killings they’ve witnessed; unconsciously, though, there’s guilt over fantasies about affairs–did Sondra have such unconscious thoughts, too? Is the fear of violence and death a cover for such guilt? Is that what everyone’s so…frantic…about?
In his review, Ebert criticized Frantic for having a number of ‘unnecessary’ scenes, such as the dance scene. As I’ve tried to show in my psychoanalytic interpretation, though, those scenes are very necessary. For the kidnapping is really a camouflage for unconscious fantasies of tossing aside one’s spouse to have an affair. The fear is really guilt.
Infinite Ocean 
