Frantic (1988)

"Don't mess with me, man. I'm an American and I am crazy!"

‘Euro-chic and retrograde…’

Back in the 90s, I frequently travelled to New York on business, cataloguing rare antique chess sets for Phillips auctioneers, then to be found in the higher reaches of the Upper East Side. Arriving in Manhattan late at night, jet-lagged and knackered, I took a yellow cab to my hotel from the airport to be met by the concierge, with the news that 'she had no record of any booking under that name', subsequently blanking me and turning to somebody more important. The inevitable office cock-up. But that, in a way, is what Roman Polanski's Frantic (1988) is all about. Disorientation. Arriving in a foreign city to find your luggage has gone missing. The anonymity of the hotel room: the tasteful, tasteless framed prints, the hygienic strip of paper guarding the plastic loo seat, the mini-bar with the inevitable bottle of Evian, a sea of beige, the transience, the blandness of the marbled hotel lobby: coffee tables, newsstands, gold-plated trim and luxury baubles for sale, behind glass, and on the marbled counter the serried tourist pamphlets nobody reads. And the polite, disengaged reservation of the hotel staff, mirrored by the hell of the European 'Continental' hotel buffet breakfast: tongue-tied, bleary-eyed guests bumping into each other over the orange juice machine, stale croissants, muzak and those little plastic cartons of confit jam.

‘that curious smell on the Metro, of baguette, coffee and sewage…’

The plot's relatively simple: Dr. Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) is a fifty something American heart surgeon on a boring business trip or conference in Paris; and his wife, Sondra (Betty Buckley), goes missing. Kidnapped. While Harrison's in his Psycho shower— at the Grand Hotel on the rue Scribe, with a View-Master panorama of the Paris Opera House. So, in tried-and-tested tested-fashion, he rejects the help of the professional police, and jolly good amateur that he is (shades of Buchan, that), he attempts to get her back. With the help of edgy sexpot Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner), young enough to be his daughter, in big hair and a fetching red mini dress. Something must have been in the European water supply, as in the same year, The Vanishing, a brilliant and disturbing psychological thriller by Dutch director George Sluizer (which I need to cover at some point) hit the screens on more or less the same theme: a young couple stop at a petrol station and the wife disappears without a trace.

‘a fetching red mini dress..’