![]() Alfred Dreyfus, however, was an innocent man there was no substance to the accusations brought against him at trial. We can have a debate, and should, about how Hollywood, and the American legal system, should now treat Roman Polanski. I’m sorry, but that comparison is obscene. Most of the people who harass me do not know me and know nothing about the case.” In an interview included in the film’s press notes, he says, “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.” Regarding his own case, and the way it’s now viewed, he says, “I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done. But it doesn’t have to be conjecture, because Polanski has been explicit about it. It might be a leap of conjecture to say that Polanski, dogged by the accusations that resulted in his own trial, and (self-imposed) exile from Hollywood, 42 years ago, now sees himself in the figure of Alfred Dreyfus. His time on Devil’s Island, which we see all too briefly, is a hellish exile for him, and the whole dramatic momentum of the movie is: How will his persecution end? Can this injustice be overturned? In that sense, “An Officer and a Spy” feels, at times, like Polanski’s version of Spielberg’s “The Post” - a movie that tells the story of a historical injustice, and an attempt to right that injustice, with an all-too-pointed subtext of topical urgency.īut there’s another layer of meaning to “An Officer and Spy.” Dreyfus, played in the movie by Louis Garrel with the intensity of a stoic bird (in his pince-nez, he looks like a feral-geek James Joyce as played by Steven Soderbergh), is an honorable soul who gets slandered, unfairly convicted, and becomes a martyr. Given the disturbingly explicit rise of anti-Semitism in Europe today, the parallels are all too obvious, and it’s clear why they matter. In France, the Dreyfus case represents how anti-Semitic fervor could rise up out of the national soil to become policy - and that, in hindsight, carried ominous implications for where Europe was headed. It seems there are two reasons, only one of them good. ![]() As the Dreyfus case played out, in an increasingly fractious and public way, over 12 years, it became a referendum on injustice, anti-Semitism, and the moral identity of France - and, by implication, the larger world of Europe. But the forces against him, which amounted to a conspiracy on the part of the French military, made him, by design, a symbolic figure: a totem of the new wave of anti-Semitism that was beginning to sweep into the new century. The movie, adapted from a 2013 historical novel by Robert Harris, who co-wrote the script with Polanski (as he did on “The Ghost Writer,” also adapted from a Harris novel), is a lavishly scaled, grandly mounted, rigorously true-to-the-facts dramatization of the Dreyfus affair - the fabled and scandalous case, starting in 1894, of the French Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus, who was convicted of treason in a secret court martial and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island.ĭreyfus was, in fact, an innocent man who was railroaded. But Roman Polanski has made it all but impossible to do so with “An Officer and a Spy.” In general, I tend to be a die-hard believer in separating the man from the art. ![]() Nevertheless, what she articulated touched a nerve. Martel said she wouldn’t attend a gala dinner in honor of the movie, but staunchly defended the Venice Film Festival’s decision to program it. “I don’t separate the man from the art.” So said Lucrecia Martel, the Argentine filmmaker and president of this year’s Venice Film Festival jury, when asked at a press conference about “ J’Accuse (An Officer and a Spy),” the new Roman Polanski film. ![]()
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