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...