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Some months ago, when TCM had a spotlight on jazz in the movies, one of the movies profiled was Knife in the Water, the debut film from Polish director Roman Polański. It's getting another airing tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM, or overnight tonight depending on your time zone and how you think of these things, as one of TCM's Imports for the week, so I sat down to watch it to do a post on here.

Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka) are a married couple traveling early one Sunday morning to the Masurian lake district of northeastern Poland in order to spend a day out on the lake in their sailboat. Now, the fact that they actually have a private car and a sailboat implies that they're in the more connected class of Polish society since this was of course the Communist era, but that's only discussed a bit in conversation. As they're driving along a country road, an unnamed Young Man (Zygmunt Malanowicz) shows up in the middle of the road like a game of chicken, daring Andrzej to stop and pick him up as a hitchhiker.

Andrzej does stop and pick up the young man, telling him that the couple is only going as far as the marina. The young man has never been sailing before, and surprisingly, Andrzej asks him if he'd like to join the couple on the boat. Equally surprisingly, the young man says yes.

Andrzej is a bit mean to the young man, because Andrzej feels the young man has no real life experience, and certainly knows nothing about sailing to the point that the young man would probably run the boat aground or something if he tried to take the helm and sail it. There's also some implied sexual tension. After some hours, it begins to rain and the three go below decks to talk, play pick-up-sticks, and bed down for the night until they get up bright and early the next morning to head back to the marina and home.

But a funny thing happens. Krystyna and the young man wake up first and go up top, not actually doing much of anything other than starting morning preparations. But when Andrzej gets up, he has some sort of jealousy, leading to a fight over the young man's knife, the titular knife in the water. The young man jumps into the lake to try to retrieve it, and when the couple can't find him, Andrzej worries that he's killed the young man and will be found out.

Knife in the Water is a movie that's visually pretty, having been filmed in a picturesque lake region and being set mostly out on that lake and in the boat. But for a lot of the movie, there's not a whole lot happening other than talk and more talk. The characters can be a bit gratuitously mean at times and tough to care about, so Knife in the Water certainly isn't a movie for everybody. Definitely it wouldn't be that high on my list of foreign films to show people who don't know much about foreign films, but for people who want to try something decidedly not Hollywood, Knife in the Water isn't such a bad film to pick.

Knife in the Water did get a DVD release courtesy of Criterion, but that of course means it's a pricey DVD.