Tess (1980): How Polanski’s Troubled Production Made a Pastoral Masterpiece

Movies of the 80s recognizes that content surrounding someone like Roman Polanski can be controversial and hurtful to those who've been through similar trauma. This article is not intended to venerate Roman Polanski the man but rather, to discuss a movie that is a great work of art despite the character of its creator.

A Pastoral Film Born From Chaos

Roman Polanski’s Tess might be the most paradoxical film of the early 1980s. Adapted from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the movie glows with pastoral beauty and painterly restraint. Yet behind the camera was a production riddled with strikes, tragedy, and the looming shadow of Polanski’s exile. Out of that storm came a three-hour film that critics praised as one of the decade’s most luminous literary adaptations.

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Strikes, Seasons, and a Death on Set

Polanski’s ambition was to shoot Hardy’s rural England in a natural rhythm, following the seasons across the French countryside. Production moved between Normandy and Brittany, but the pastoral vision came at a cost: frequent strikes by French technicians slowed progress and stretched an already lengthy schedule.

Then came a blow that reshaped the film. Geoffrey Unsworth, one of Britain’s great cinematographers, suffered a fatal heart attack during the shoot. He had already filmed many of the sweeping exterior sequences, suffused with weathered light and epic scale. French cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet stepped in to complete the interiors. Together, their work was honored posthumously with the Academy Award for Best Cinematography — a bittersweet recognition that memorialized Unsworth’s final images.

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Nastassja Kinski’s Breakthrough and Controversy

The film would not exist without Nastassja Kinski. As Tess, she is both vulnerable and radiant, embodying Hardy’s heroine as a figure shaped and destroyed by fate. Her performance launched her to international stardom. But her off-screen relationship with Polanski has long complicated how the film is remembered.

Reports from the era described a close, sometimes romantic attachment between director and star, a dynamic that has been reassessed in the decades since. Kinski herself has offered shifting perspectives on their connection. For some viewers, this history casts a shadow over the film. For others, her performance remains a testament to her talent, regardless of the circumstances.

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Critical Reception: From Ebert to the Academy

When Tess premiered in 1979 in France and later reached U.S. audiences in 1980, critics were struck by its painterly elegance. Roger Ebert praised it as a “wonderful film” about doomed sexuality and inevitability, noting that Polanski resisted sensationalism in favor of a slow, tragic drift toward fate.

The Academy responded in kind. Tess earned six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It ultimately won three — for cinematography, art direction, and costume design — cementing its reputation as a work of extraordinary craft. While it lost Best Picture to Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, its technical triumphs guaranteed its place in film history.

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Legacy: Beauty in Tension

Seen today, Tess is inseparable from the contradictions of its creation. The luminous landscapes and period textures exist because of an arduous shoot that dragged cast and crew across the French countryside. The Oscar-winning cinematography is forever tied to the death of Geoffrey Unsworth. The breakthrough performance of Nastassja Kinski cannot be discussed without addressing her relationship with Polanski.

And yet, the film endures. For many, Tess is one of the most visually stunning adaptations ever put to screen, a film where tragedy behind the camera seems to mirror the inexorable tragedy of Hardy’s novel. It stands as proof that beauty can emerge from chaos — and that sometimes, the messiness of production history becomes part of a movie’s very soul.

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