Beginning with a couple (Andrzej and Krystyna) driving a car on a narrow road in countryside, stopped by a hitchhiker. They decided to take him with them and they took this young man to their sailing trip. Everything seems good but the situation changed when Andrzej found his wife and the young man talking while he slept. He got mad at them two and began to the provoke young guy and finally dropped his knife into the water. The young man was extremely angry and fought with Andrzej. The young man fell into water and disappeared, which made Krystyna thought he dead and thus she blamed Andrzej for killing the young man. Andrzej consequently jumped into water to look for the young guy. However, the young man did not die and instead he climbed on the boat, making sex with Krystyna and left. Krystyna navigated back to the harbor and Andrzej was waiting her there. He wanted to drive to the police office and the film ended up with the scene that the car stopped at the sign which written with "10 miles from the police office."
For the content, Knife in the Water is a typical art film because of its ambiguous storyline. It is hard to tell the protagonists and the antagonists in the films and the main roles lack a clear goal to achieve. It seems like the director just followed what was happening during the whole trip, using his own povs to perceive the whole world and film what he perceived from the world around him. The ambiguous ending also illustrates the director's personal choice, which gives audiences a broad imagination to think about what's going on. Or what if the most important of the film is not whether the couple went to the police office, but what's going on in the film and how the actors react to all the randoms happened to them.
In the technique respect, the filmmakers utilized a more "documentary" format to express the whole film due to the considerable location shooting within the whole film. Also, the deep focuses which were in the films are also great. Moreover, the composition is another good part of this film. For example, when the young man came closer to Andrzej, the shot of Andrzej's legs composed a perfect triangle. It is not hard to see that the director was trying to use the camera to make the audiences follow his povs. All the delicate design track shooting is very elegant and fluent, such as the boat sailing in the lake.
Knife In the Water exemplified how art film illustrated a filmmaker's perception towards the world and how he conveyed his perception into films, taking a giant leap which influenced mainstream films a lot in the future. Art cinema, as an increasingly important film style in post war era, began to draw more and more attentions from the mainstream.
