Tess       

By Tom Keogh

Roman Polanski adapted Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles and came up with this moody, haunting film starring Nastassia Kinski as the farm girl who is misused by the aristocrat for whom she works and who is then caught in a marriage where her initial happiness soon turns to grief. Fans of the novel may feel unpersuaded by Polanski's effort to marry Hardy's Dorset vision with his own fascination with psychosexual impulses toward survival, but the film is an often stunning thing to see, and Kinski's sensitive, intelligent performance lingers in the memory.

Academy Awards

Tess won Academy Awards for Art Direction/Set Decoration (Pierre Guffroy - Art Direction, Jack Stephens - Art Direction), Cinematography (Geoffrey Unsworth, Ghislain Cloquet) and Costume Design (Anthony Powell). It was also nominated for Best Picture (Claude Berri - Producer, Timothy Burril - Co-producer), Directing (Roman Polanski), and for Music Scoring Awards (Best Original Score; Philippe Sarde).

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