He has at last begun to look his age. Well, no, that’s an exaggeration. Roman Polanski looks forty but is in fact sixty-one. At least he looks like an adult, though, which through most of his life he hardly ever has. His features—fetching or ferrety, depending on your point of view—have softened. His focus, however, has sharpened—or has sharpened again. He has just completed work on one of his most significant films in years, the screen adaptation of the Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” which is scheduled for release this Christmas season—in time, as they say in Hollywood, for Academy consideration.

Dorfman’s play concerns the interactions of three characters: a skittish woman who years ago survived torture and rape at the hands of a brutal military regime; her husband, an eminent attorney and human-rights activist who has been chosen by his country’s new democratic President to head a commission charged with ventilating (though not prosecuting) a circumscribed fraction of the prior regime’s depredations, conspicuously not to include cases such as his own wife’s; and a Good Samaritan doctor who, one evening, stops to help the husband after his car has broken down on a remote stretch of highway, and then volunteers to deliver him to the weekend cottage where his wife has been anxiously waiting. The wife instantly recognizes the doctor’s voice, with absolute and horrifying conviction, as that of the man who supervised her tortures as she lay blindfolded and strapped to one of the regime’s interrogation tables, and raped her repeatedly. Polanski has cast Sigourney Weaver as the wife, Stuart Wilson as the lawyer-husband, and Ben Kingsley as the doctor.

The usual procedure for adapting a stage play to the screen is to open it out, with, for instance, all sorts of exterior location shots. In this instance, however, Polanski, Dorfman, and their co-scenarist, Rafael Yglesias, decided to draw the story in even tighter, restricting the action to a single stormy night; almost the entire ten-week shoot, earlier this year, took place inside a ramshackle vacation house built on a dimly lighted soundstage at the Studios de Boulogne, outside Paris. It was on this set that I caught up with Polanski. The first day I was there, he and his crew happened to be working through one of the film’s most shocking early scenes: The grateful husband has invited the doctor to spend the night, the doctor has sprawled out on the living-room sofa and gone to sleep, and, some time later, the wife (who had bolted at the sound of the doctor’s voice) is returning. She approaches the sofa stealthily, but as she does the doctor awakens, and she bashes him senseless. She drags his limp body across the room and starts tying him into a wooden chair.

In the play, the doctor stayed unconscious until he was firmly lashed to the chair, but Polanski and his colleagues have energized the scene considerably: as the doctor is being tied up, he regains consciousness and calls out in fear, threatening to wake his host, who is asleep in the next room. In a panic, the wife reaches under her skirt, yanks off her panties, and shoves them into his mouth. Then she reaches for a roll of packing tape on a nearby table, hikes up her skirt in order to straddle his lap, and then wraps tape around his head and mouth—once, twice, three times—and leans close to his cheek to rip the tape from the roll with her teeth.

The effect is visceral and perverse, even after five or six rehearsals and ten or twelve takes. The scene is also quite an ordeal for the actors, particularly for Kingsley, who, though his neck and face have been oiled, still suffers during the tearing off of the tape before each new take. Polanski and Kingsley joke between takes about just how many beers one is going to owe the other when this is all over, but clearly Polanski is concerned. “Ach!” he says at one point. “This is terrible. I should have had them rehearse on me. The director should never put his actor through something he wouldn’t be willing to endure himself.”

Suddenly, he grabs the roll and wraps tape—once, twice, three times—around his own head.

“Death and the Maiden” might have served as an alternative title for well over half of Roman Polanski’s movies (for “Knife in the Water,” for instance, and “Repulsion,” and “Chinatown,” and “The Tenant” and “Tess,” and “Frantic” and “Bitter Moon,” and maybe even for “Macbeth” or “Rosemary’s Baby”), but Polanski would hardly have seemed the most obvious candidate to direct the film version of Dorfman’s play, which is an overtly political thriller. After all—except, possibly, in “Chinatown”—Polanski as a director has seldom shown the remotest interest in overt politics of any sort.

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