Tess

France/UK 1979, d Roman Polanski

No-one could ever accuse Roman Polanski of playing safe. In self-imposed exile in France, he not only took the 15-year-old Nastassia Kinski as a lover, but two years later he gave her the title role of his next film, a three-hour adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbevilles. Since this is a story that pivots around the rape of a young peasant girl after she follows up rumours of her noble lineage, it's unsurprising that US distributors were initially wary, though it turned out to be a surprise box-office hit.

Given Polanski's past, not least his ultraviolent take on Macbeth, what most surprises about Tess is its reticence. Tess's budding sexuality is depicted as much metaphorically as literally, with Polanski finding visual equivalents of Hardy's view of her as being tied to nature's rhythm. Similarly, her violation is deliberately obscured in terms of both action and motivation - which is also true to the original.

Because Polanski feared extradition from Britain, Tess was filmed in Normandy, which turned out to be closer to nineteenth-century Dorset than the genuine article. Much less happily, cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth died during shooting and his replacement Ghislain Cloquet shortly afterwards: both won posthumous Oscars.