WHAT? Is a less-well known film by Roman Polanski in which a young, beautiful and extraordinarily naive American tourist barely escapes being raped by three men, only to end up in a large Italian seaside villa inhabited by all kinds of weird characters.

One gets the impression that Polanski, who also co-wrote and performed in this film, was attempting to create a visionary work of art, one transcending the boundaries of cinema.

The jarring opening throws the audience right into an ongoing conversation between the girl and three guys in a car, without any background information. It then proceeds promptly to the near-rape sequence and subsequent escape via a lift which has something of a fairy-tale quality to it.

The lift arrives at a large villa, and from there it becomes very hard to make sense of the happenings and people in it. It is as though the protagonist has entered an alternate or dream-like reality. She is confused, too, but eventually she also engages in behavior that is difficult to understand.

Whatever the meaning behind the actions and settings, there is a bit of philosophy, a bit of symbolism, bit of eroticism, a lot of absurdity and unfortunately not nearly enough laughs.

The villa is full of paintings, and, in fact, one sequence involves the transport of the huge famous romantic painting "The raft of the Medusa", which suggests that perhaps this movie is itself to be understood as the cinematic analog of a huge painting on a canvas, with the villa being the analog of a life raft which prevents the submergence of its inhabitants into reality.

The 'movie as a painting' vision is also suggested by the beautiful and colorful cinematography, and the 'weirdness at the Mediterranean' vibe is reminiscent of THE MAGUS (1968), another surrealist movie.

I don't think it is necessary to understand visionary work in its entirety to be able to appreciate it as such, but at least the basic patterns that make it so have to be accessible. That is not the case here, and it is likely the reason why the film falls short of its presumed ambition.

There are hints here and there to seemingly help the audience make at least some sense of what is happening, but they are fleeting and usually end up being dead-ends. For example, over an hour into the film, there are a couple scenes suggesting that perhaps the people are not quite as "real" as we might have supposed, as they repeat almost exactly behavior from a day earlier. Other movies have taken this idea quite successfully in different directions, such as THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975) (robots), EXISTENZ (1999) (video game characters) and THE TRUMAN SHOW (1998) (actors in a hyper-reality show) but here, this suggestion is never explored, and ends up being just another weird and difficult to parse aspect of the movie among many.

If at least the absurdism were funny, but I laughed out loud only at one scene. Overall this is mainly for Polanski completists and those who enjoy surrealism even if it is inaccessible to them.