SOURCE: Crnkovic, Gordana. “Film Reviews: Death and the Maiden.” Film Quarterly 50, no. 3 (spring 1997): 39-45.

In the following essay, Crnkovic presents a critical analysis of director Roman Polanski's film adaptation of Death and the Maiden, discussing how the director interpreted both the original play and Dorfman's screenplay.

I had already been in the United States for a few years when the war started in my homeland, the former Yugoslavia. As time passed, the images and reports of massacres, rape, shelling, and ethnic cleansing accumulated. And yet many of my American friends and acquaintances still could not see who was doing what to whom; they could not figure out their own position on this conflict. I asked them what made it so hard to see what was happening in this war, given the availability of daily reports and images. They said things like “They always talked about how complex the...