The credit titles for Polanski's What? are in the form of signatures in a lined exercise book; and as the movie progresses and hindsight improves, they assume an increasing appropriateness. For despite its erratic moments of brilliance, the overall impression left by the film is of a rather puerile graffito scrawled in the margins of its literary antecedents. On the one hand, the pornographic tradition … of the violation of the perennially innocent; on the other, the more singular eccentricities of Alice in Wonderland whose best known incidents Polanski deliberately evokes…. In one sense, the two poles are not so very far apart: 'classical' pornography was the black-humoured expression of serious philosophical concerns, and one could argue that the prim product of the Victorian nursery provides the missing link between the elegant libertinism of the eighteenth century and the scatological permissiveness of the twentieth. They are none the less separated by the fact that the violated virgin has always been the vehicle for exploring the predominance of evil over good and for exposing various contemporary social hypocrisies, whereas the butts of Carroll's humour are more abstract and intellectual: the supposition of a relationship between cause and effect, and of a logically ordered universe; the concept of time itself. It takes a Colossus of Buñuel's stature to bestride the two, and this—on the present evidence—Polanski is not. His sexual notations and his surrealism remain (except for such occasional felicitious details as the heroine's blue leg) obdurately separate, and even detract from one another. The assorted huffings and puffings of the different species of the sexuawly obsessed are too literally rendered to sit easily with his featherweight reflections about the nature of time and the deceptiveness of the déjà-vu: his characters have too much density to convince us that they are mere figments of the troubled imagination, yet too little substance to impose themselves as individuals. (p. 95)