Bitter Moon

Bitter Moon (1992) takes place on a ship. An English couple travelling to India meet an American writer in a wheelchair. He starts telling them the story of his own marriage, and the more he tells the more unpleasant it becomes. The listening husband wants to leave and comes back every night. The structure is a trap. The narrator builds the story in his own favour, and the audience is drawn in alongside the listener; what begins as a love story becomes an account of humiliation and revenge. The source is Pascal Bruckner's novel. Roman Polanski directed, and his wife Emmanuelle Seigner plays Mimi at the centre of it. Peter Coyote plays the writer, with Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas as the English couple. It was harshly reviewed on release, with many critics calling it excessive. Its standing has shifted somewhat over the years and some now read it as black comedy. It runs 139 minutes. Good for: uncomfortable relationship narratives, unreliable narrator structures, and Polanski. Less good for: the sexual content is explicit and several scenes are built on humiliation. It is long and repetitive. Taken together with the director's own history and this film's subject, many viewers will find it unwatchable.