Roman Polanski’s film about the Dreyfus affair is undeniably good, but you just knew it was going to end badly when the film’s producers sat the director down with the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner for a Q&A featured in the movie’s press notes, distributed at the Venice Film Festival this August.
Before anyone had the chance to watch An Officer and a Spy, centered on the seismic fin de siècle scandal about anti-Semitism at the heart of the French establishment—and which has resurgent relevance today—they were dunked into a warm bath of contemporary male persecution complex, flowing with bitter, aging-man tears over Polanski’s suffering at the hands of what Bruckner called “neo-feminist McCarthyism.”
It got worse. On Friday, the French actress Valentine Monnier said Polanski raped her on a ski trip in Gstaad in 1975, when she was 18. “Rape is a time bomb,” she told the daily newspaper Le Parisien. “The memory does not fade.” Polanski’s lawyer denied the charge.
Crucial background for Generation Z: Despite having been charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977, Polanski has always maintained his innocence. He served 42 days in prison after pleading guilty to a lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor, but, worried about a superseding charge and a much longer adjusted sentence, Polanski fled United States justice and went on the luxury lam.
Bitter, aging-man tears over Polanski’s suffering at the hands of what Bruckner called “neo-feminist McCarthyism.”
His supporters—and there are many in the French creative community—portray this as quasi-heroic. (Polanski lives in a chalet in Gstaad with his wife, An Officer and a Spy co-star Emmanuelle Seigner.) Never mind that the illegality in question was going on the run from the law, a fact that has never been in dispute; Polanski now holds that his problem is feminism. Except women are not the reason he cannot go to any country with an extradition treaty with the U.S., which explains his absence from Venice; his own choices are. Meanwhile, the current count of other accusations of sexual assault against him just went from four to five.
Also crucial background: Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, was one of the people brutally murdered by Charles Manson’s followers in 1969. Polanski’s experience of persecution and loss includes a youth spent in foster homes after his mother was killed at Auschwitz. Thanks to fair skin and light eyes, the young Roman was able to pass as Christian. There is no doubt Polanski earned part of his persecution complex. For the rest, though, he’s on his own.
And so with Bruckner’s artless setup … Don’t say it, don’t say it, oh of course, there, he said it: Polanski can relate to Dreyfus, an innocent man framed by a foul conspiracy. “In the story,” he says, “I sometimes find moments I have experienced myself. I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done. Most of the people who harass me do not know me and know nothing about the case … My work is not therapy. However, I must admit that I am familiar with many of the workings of the apparatus of persecution shown in the film, and that has clearly inspired me.”
There is no doubt Polanski earned part of his persecution complex. For the rest, though, he’s on his own.
Uh huh. The ill-advised interview helped sink Polanski’s already slim chances of finding a U.S. distributor for An Officer and a Spy, even though the film got a five-minute standing ovation and won Venice’s second-highest honor, the Silver Lion.
When it opens in French theaters next week, it should do well. After more than a decade of a rising number of anti-Semitic acts, French Jews are expatriating to Israel in record numbers.
And oddly, the conclusion of the Dreyfus affair spurred legislation in 1905 that finally, formally separated church and state in France. Today, paradoxically, that same law supporting secularism and a universal Frenchness has been used to suppress minority-religious identification—notably Muslim women seeking to wear the veil. An Officer and a Spy resurrects a bigoted, oppressive France that was supposed to be long dead, but can look pretty familiar today.
As it was with Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York, which was denied a U.S. release due to concerns about the director’s personal conduct, American audiences probably won’t get a chance to decide for themselves if they wish to see Polanski’s film about the Dreyfus affair.
An Officer and a Spy resurrects a bigoted, oppressive France that was supposed to be long dead, but can look pretty familiar today.
This is really too bad. An Officer and a Spy is meticulous in how it deconstructs the Belle Époque. Rather than basking in the period’s prosperity and innovation, Polanski shows a gloomier, more beaten-down society with period rigor and convincing grime. Interiors are bleak, camera angles oppressively wide, lipstick is smudged, feathers are crushed. On the Polanski scale of paranoia the story itself is low, though he and writer Robert Harris, who wrote the novel that is the film’s source material, have some fun with the forensics. (Handwriting analysis and forgeries were the deep fakes of their time.)
As always with Polanski, the powers that be come in for a grilling. There are sympathetic, carefully calibrated performances by The Artist’s Jean Dujardin, who plays an intelligence officer who heroically defies the system, and by Louis Garrel as a stubborn and not particularly likable Dreyfus, cementing Garrel’s transition from perved-over hunk to Serious Actor with Range.
Overall, An Officer and a Spy is a moving and sophisticated portrait of an out-of-control ideological state that victimizes minorities and goes to fumbling, insidious lengths to cover it up. If this sounds familiar, Americans would find the movie enlightening despite Polanski’s myriad personal sins. As with the Dreyfus affair, all it would take is one brave film distributor to rise up and take an unpopular stand.
