The people who are willing to admit Roman Polanski’s greatness as a filmmaker invariably point to his earlier films — Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown — as evidence. In other words, the ones he made before he was charged for — and before he admitted to — the 1977 rape of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer. Maybe they feel that it’s okay to praise movies made before he admitted to being a monster. But to get at Polanski’s true claim to greatness, you have to confront the stubborn empathy and depth of the films he’s made over the last thirty years, the inexplicable paradox of a man whose work showed a deepened understanding of suffering after he had victimized someone else.
I’m not arguing that Polanski’s art excuses his crime. I am noting and interrogating the maturity of his late work. In a quartet of movies beginning with 1994’s Death and the Maiden, and continuing with The Pianist (2002), Oliver Twist (2005) and An Officer and a Spy (2019), Polanski has been investigating what it means to be a victim who refuses the mantle of victimhood; what it means for those who’ve been victimized to live within a political or social structure that perpetrates and condones the violence done to them; what happens when institutional control intersects with the human capacity for cruelty; and how, for all the damage done to the individual, violence, as Hannah Arendt recognized, can never equal power.
The latest of these four films, An Officer and a Spy, Polanski’s retelling of the Dreyfus Affair, won the César for Best Film in France in 2020. Coming after the MeToo movement, and with Polanski having fled the US in 1978 while awaiting sentencing on six charges involving the drugging and rape of Geimer, the win resulted in an uproar which caused the entire board of the César Academy to resign. No American distributor would touch the film, until now: Film Forum in New York City is hosting the movie’s US premiere for two weeks beginning this past Friday, August 8. It should never have taken this long.
For much of Polanski’s career, as brilliantly made as his movies often were, they seemed the work of a ghoulish prankster. When Mia Farrow learns she’s given birth to the son of the devil at the end of Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski is less interested in making us share her horror than in painting her as the butt of a sadistic joke at which he wants the audience to laugh.
In Robert Towne’s original script for Chinatown, a detective played by Jack Nicholson helps socialite Faye Dunaway and her daughter, born after Dunaway was raped by her rich and powerful father John Huston, escape to Mexico. Over Towne’s fervent objections, Polanski rewrote the ending so that Dunaway ends up dead and her daughter is taken away by Huston who, it’s implied, will rape her as he did Dunaway, a metaphor — though not a very deep one — for how the powerful who are never brought to justice violate us all. American audiences, already slipping into post-Watergate cynicism before Nixon had even left office, were all too ready to believe that.
Polanski’s own experience — the way he spent his childhood trying to survive Nazi-occupied Poland after his family had been taken to Dachau, enduring the horror of his pregnant wife’s slaughter at the hands of the Manson family — has often been invoked to explain the bleakness of his movies. That may be, but those horrors didn’t make the movies any better. There’s no disgust at the triumph of evil in Polanski’s early work because the director was saying that only a fool would expect evil to lose. He wasn’t asking for the audience’s sympathy, but he wasn’t extending any to his characters either. He didn’t view their fates as tragic; instead, he presented them with the obscene leer of a jack-o-lantern. You could understand this sardonic grimness as a coping strategy and still be repulsed.
It’s often said in defense of Polanski the director that we have to judge the movies on their own merits and not use them as a means of condemning Polanski the confessed rapist. I agree. But a reason that’s almost never cited in favor of separating the art from the artist is that while personal experience may provide an artist with a subject, what it can never provide is the talent needed to express that experience. The hidden ugliness of the current emphasis on identity as indispensable to the authenticity of art is that it makes talent disposable. If you need only be female to write about female experience, black to write about black experience, Jewish to write about Jewish experience, then talent doesn’t matter.
But if I don’t think the horrors Polanski has suffered made his earlier films good, I also don’t believe that those horrors are the reason his recent work is good. Have they provided him a subject and shaped his worldview? Undeniably. But they alone can’t account for the way his work since Death and the Maiden takes serious consideration of violence and victimization in a way that he previously addressed as a grim joke.
Death and the Maiden, based on Ariel Dorfman’s play, at first seems as if it’s going to be another one of those jokes. We are plunked down in the midst of that most clichéd of landscapes, a lonely house atop a cliff on a rainswept night. We settle in for what we expect is going to be gothic melodrama and then watch as the movie busts through those expectations, even through the well-made-play structure of the movie’s source.
The setting is a Latin American country after the recent fall of a dictatorship. That house on the cliff, a modest cottage, is occupied by Paulina (Sigourney Weaver), a former student who, when she was working for the resistance, was captured and tortured by the now-fallen government. Weaver doesn’t occupy this dwelling as much as she stalks it. None of her movements are wasted; everything about her is febrile and alert, every action deliberate. And yet there’s something feral about Paulina as well. When her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) doesn’t show up on time for dinner, she grabs a piece of the chicken she’s cooked, tosses it on her plate, does the same with a handful of salad and repairs to a walk-in closet where she sits on the floor to eat, her back to the wall as if she needs to keep watch for any approaching threat.
When she hears an approaching car, she douses the lights and gets a revolver, not realizing that the vehicle is only dropping Gerardo off after his own car has broken down. Gerardo is a prominent lawyer, a critic of the defeated dictatorship, who has been tapped to head the country’s truth and reconciliation commission. Earlier we’ve seen Paulina hearing news of his appointment over the radio and snapping it off in disgust. The rules laid down for the commission don’t include the power to punish; they don’t even include the power to name the perpetrators. To Paulina it’s a whitewash that will allow the men who’ve tortured and killed to go free. Worse to her, Gerardo, who was the editor of the university resistance paper that she was working for when she was captured, will be judging the killers and torturers with no firsthand experience of the violence they routinely inflicted. In fact, Gerardo is only alive because Pauline, under torture, refused to divulge his name. And this man is set to head a committee that, instead of holding criminals responsible for their actions, will simply enact a show of forgiveness.
It’s not hard to see what makes Gerardo such a cardboard man of integrity: his infuriating reasonableness, his lofty talk about how the country must move forward, his trite little bromides like “In a democracy, the midnight knock on the door can be friendly.” He’s the blissfully ignorant paragon of high principles untested by experience. Pauline has no forgiveness in her, and when she gets the chance to take her revenge, she seizes it.
While Paulina and Gerardo are asleep, Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley), the man who gave Gerardo a ride home, shows up at their house to return a spare tire. From her hiding place, Paulina is sure she recognizes the voice, the speech patterns (and later the smell) of the doctor who, while she was blindfolded, tortured her with electric shocks and cigar burns and beatings, and then raped her while he played his favorite music, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” And so, she coldcocks Miranda with the barrel of her gun, ties him to a chair, stuffs her underwear in his mouth, and seals it with duct tape. What she intends to do next, she tells Gerardo, who can’t get past the gun she’s holding on him, is to extract the truth from Miranda as he tried to extract it from her. When Gerardo tells her this is a kangaroo court, she replies, to the contrary, that because he is present, Miranda will have access to the best lawyer he could hope for.
It would be easy to imagine this material being presented as a parable about how the victimized become victimizers. Polanski must have realized just how tidy a moral scheme that is, because he makes Paulina the movie’s raging moral center who, throughout this ordeal, burns with fervent and unrelenting logic. It would be easy to conclude, as Gerardo does in one of his periodic lectures, that she’s holding in contempt the system of impartial justice we regard as one of the hallmarks of a civilized society. But that’s not the purpose of the commission Gerardo will head, a commission that, in the name of national reconciliation, has no intention of seeking justice. Death and the Maiden is unnerving precisely because even as it denounces the brutalities of military dictatorship it gives us a heroine who spurns the values we hold up as separating ourselves from that brutality, a heroine who believes that to the victim those values mean nothing, that the law can never equal justice.
So what keeps Death and the Maiden from being an intellectual vigilante movie? For one thing, Polanski offers no satisfaction in revenge. He knows a democratic society can never survive administering the kind of justice Pauline craves. But he knows just how odious it is to someone who’s been made to suffer in the name of a principle, no matter how corrupt, to feel they are once again being sacrificed in the name of another principle. The final scene returns us to the concert hall we saw briefly at the beginning of the film. Paulina sits in the audience, listening to her once-beloved Schubert, looking like she’s being tortured anew. Even more apparent than her torment is how alienated she appears from everything around her — Gerardo, the politesse of the black-tie crowd, from the very idea of culture exemplified by the music she once loved and which now only brings back memories of her brutalization. This, Polanski is saying, is the permanent state of those who have suffered horrendous violence. Weaver doesn’t speak a word in the scene and yet she conveys how she is now fluent in a language almost no one else can understand.
Victimhood is not exalted in Polanski’s films as it is so often in contemporary culture. None of the protagonists of these four films are passive. The violence they endure pushes them down into their animal selves, separates them from everything good in life, from all they recognize as being human. It might seem that Oliver Twist is the outlier in this quartet, a chance for the director to indulge in some period plumminess or at least, as Polanski said at the time, to make a movie his kids could see.
But while being true to the spirit of Dickens, this Oliver Twist is deeply personal. How could it not be? 1830s England doesn’t reach the level of horror and agony of 1940s Eastern Europe, but Polanski recognizes the agony of a child in want and in fear. The film moves rapidly from one incident to the next without ever losing a sense of flow, and Polanski sketches characters on the screen as vividly as Dickens does on the page, even those only on screen for a scene or two. You take away the kindly face of Liz Smith as the woman who gives Oliver shelter on his journey to London, the corpulent self-satisfaction of Ian McNiece as the master of the poor house, his jowls shaking in outrage over the very thought of this slip of a boy who wants more, and above all Ben Kingsley’s Fagin, speaking in a high, wheedling voice and seeming to move forward on all four of his limbs, like a spider looking to sting before he’s squashed.
But even the pampering pleasures of a well-done period piece like this don’t obscure the harshness of the worldview Polanski is espousing. He shows us a world less divided horizontally by class (though it certainly is that) than vertically by the cruel and the kind, qualities that transcend class. And Polanski finds a common denominator in that cruelty: ignorance. What we see in the privileged obliviousness of the poor house masters who despise their charges, or in Oliver’s tormentor Noah Claypole, who uses what little position he has to satisfy his instinctive sadism, is a lack of moral and emotional intelligence.
Polanski ends the film with Oliver delivered safely into the arms of his new benefactor Mr. Brownlow, but he precedes that with a scene that hovers over this happy ending, a scene that, though it’s in the novel, has not as far as I can tell been included in any other adaptation: Oliver visiting the condemned Fagin in prison. The jailer who admits Oliver tells Mr. Brownlow this is nothing a child should see, and when Oliver is confronted with Fagin’s near-madness and desperation, who could argue? The irony is that Oliver has already seen sights no child should see because he lives in a society which ensures that some children, by the accident of their birth, see horrors as part of their day-to-day existence. It’s not that Polanski is incapable of delivering a happy ending but that, without diluting our satisfaction at Oliver’s safe deliverance, he wants us to understand how rare this happy ending is.
If Polanski used the story of Oliver Twist as a stand-in for his own childhood, there’s no such distance in the film that preceded it, Polanski’s best, The Pianist (2002). Adapted by Polanski and the English playwright Ronald Harwood from the memoir by the Polish classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, the film follows Szpilman (Adrien Brody), saved from the train that took his family to Treblinka — none of them came back — as he tries to survive the war, hiding in empty Warsaw apartments or wandering among the ruins of the city before Allied troops arrive.
The movie is shockingly direct. At times — as when a Jewish woman being detained asks a Nazi officer a question and he responds by shooting her in the head — I thought to myself, this must be what it’s like to watch people murdered. The killings aren’t particularly graphic, but they are sudden, clumsy, blunt. They have none of the neatness we associate with most onscreen killings. In one scene Nazis pluck Jews from a crowd waiting to cross a street, pair them off, and make them dance for their amusement — old with young, a very short man with a very tall woman (she recalls the Otto Dix painting of the journalist Sylvia von Harden). Some of these people — a man with prominent teeth, a cripple who falls off his crutches in mid-dance — could have been presented as grotesques, as characters were in earlier Polanski films. But what Polanski does here is to show us human beings reduced to grotesques.
Polanski has attributed the impact of Szpilman’s memoir to the fact that it was written right after the war when the memory of it was still fresh. Polanski’s movie though, made sixty years later, feels both immediate and settled. Despite all we know about the Holocaust, what we see is shocking even as it feels that Polanski is showing us things he’s been living with for years. The Pianist is what happens when shock has become embedded in memory. The corpses of the starved on the sidewalks of the Warsaw Ghetto increase incrementally as the movie goes on, until finally they mingle with the corpses of those who’ve been murdered and all the other debris of the streets. We see Szpilman and other residents of the Ghetto pass by these bodies not because they are uncaring but because this horror has seeped into the quotidian fabric of their lives.
Szpilman is often in the position of spectator here. He watches the Warsaw Ghetto uprising from the window of one of his hideouts. Later, hiding in an apartment across the street from the German police headquarters, he sees a man casually walk up to a German on duty and shoot him dead. This is the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising. We experience the events as Szpilman must have, with no advance warning, nothing that connects these actions to any larger context that would explain them. In this world, violence doesn’t come with an explanation.
Much of The Pianist, with Szpilman alone onscreen in his various hideouts, is essentially a silent film, sometimes in unexpected and unsettling ways. When Szpilman, fleeing the Germans, hops a wall and finds himself confronted with the rubble to which the Nazis have reduced Warsaw, he stops, stunned, and then, after a pause, he continues on his way, though there’s nowhere left to go. For a second, the sight of Szpilman in that vast wreckage recalls the sight of Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr. standing amidst the ruins of the house that has collapsed around him. And Szpilman, continuing down the road to who knows what, is reminiscent of silent comedy at its most beautiful and melancholy.
The Pianist ends with Szpilman returning to his life as a musician performing in front of an audience. In a movie the director has called hopeful, it’s telling that this scene is a reversal of the final moment of Death and the Maiden, with its illustration of how culture itself could seem irrelevant to those who had endured the unimaginable. Here, as Szpilman plays Chopin’s Grand Polonaise for piano and orchestra, Polanski seems to be saying art can be a way back to our finer selves, but those finer selves have no chance when life is reduced to the imperative to survive.
It would be evasive to continue on to An Officer and a Spy without addressing the reasons the movie has taken so long to get shown in this country (and as I write, there is no indication that there will be any further engagements). The debate over Polanski has settled — some would say calcified — into those who find it an outrage that the man is even allowed to work, and, the camp I belong to, those who believe that the worth of a man’s character and the worth of his work are often two separate things. The arguments are familiar. But the voice that has barely been acknowledged in these arguments belongs to Samantha Geimer.
I don’t know anyone who’s read Geimer’s remarkable memoir, The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski, though many have been content to speak for her, to portray her as a victim before anything else, a portrayal she refuses. In her book Geimer is neither out to exonerate Polanski nor to deny that they were both a victim of Judge Laurence J. Rittenbrand’s refusal, after public pressure, to accept the plea deal that all sides had agreed to and that would have laid the matter to rest for Geimer. (It’s worth noting that when Rittenbrand scuttled the plea deal and Polanski’s lawyer Douglas Dalton petitioned for Rittenbrand to be removed from the case, Dalton was supported by the district attorney.) “The publicity surrounding it,” Geimer wrote in a 2003 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times (in which she argued Polanski’s movies should be judged on their own merits), “was so traumatic that what [Polanski] did to me seemed to pale in comparison.” In her memoir Geimer says, “When my mom told me [Polanski had fled the country] — I won’t say it was one of the happiest days of our lives, but certainly it was the one filled with the greatest relief . . . No more telling my story. No more seeing myself called ‘sex victim girl’ in the paper.” Several times when I’ve pointed that out, I’ve been told that what Geimer wants doesn’t matter. It’s ironic that the woman Polanski assaulted, like the heroine of Death and the Maiden, found herself at the mercy of a system in which the experience of the victim is of secondary importance, if it’s considered at all. What should have happened to Polanski? Should his movies be judged by their quality or by his character? On both questions, I defer to Samantha Geimer.
An Officer and a Spy, made when Polanski was eighty-five, is an old pro’s triumph, a movie of such calm, unshowy assurance that the craft itself is pleasurable. Spanning the time between Captain Alfred Dreyfus’ imprisonment on Devil’s Island after being falsely convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans and his exoneration eleven years later, the story is unusual among Polanski’s recent work in that it’s not told from the point of view of the victim. In fact, except for the beginning and end of the movie, Dreyfus (played by Louis Garrel) is barely present. I think that’s deliberate on the part of the director and his co-scenarist Robert Harris. Alfred Dreyfus existed for France much more as a symbol — of the perfidy of Jews on one side, of the corruption of an establishment that would sacrifice individual liberty to maintain a show of strength on the other — than a human being.
An Officer and a Spy is told from the point of view of Major Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), the head of the military intelligence service who discovered Dreyfus’ innocence and, when he tried to overturn the verdict, was court martialed for his efforts. In passing we hear Picquart casually say, in answer to a question, that he doesn’t like Jews — that may seem too casual in a movie about one of the most famous examples of antisemitism in modern times. But that seeming aside carries weight, not just because Polanski dislikes black-and-white moral schemes, but because the journey he has laid out for Picquart is to be able to see what most of France cannot: Dreyfus as a man before he is anything else.
The story of the Dreyfus Affair is fiendishly complicated: there are forged documents, instances of Picquart’s own staff and the military command working to sabotage him, diplomatic relationships that shade into sexual ones — all of it against the background of a nation ripped in two by the allegations. In the hands of a conventional director it could be deadly dull, a procession of mustached and uniformed men talking in one ornate room after another. The French title of the film J’Accuse is taken from Zola’s famous cri de coeur against the French military and political establishment (it earned him a year in jail, which he spent exiled in England until it was safe to return to France). The clunky English title turns out to be much better suited. Polanski and his co-scenarist Robert Harris present the Dreyfus Affair as a sort of spy story in which the hero, Picquart, is in effect working within and against the organization to which he has sworn an oath. Picquart’s determination to clear Dreyfus, of course, can’t stay secret for long. And as Picquart is bound to conduct his campaign in the open, the movie becomes something new in Polanski’s body of work.
Polanski, whose life has traversed borders, whose experience has taught him to be suspicious of national allegiances that do not provide protection even to a nation’s citizens, who has been only too aware of how the principles cited to maintain nations are used all too often to sacrifice individuals, chooses as his hero a man who believes in his country, who believes in the military, and who is willing to say that everyone against him is a traitor to those principles. That could make Picquart seem almost like a fanatic, but luckily Jean Dujardin (best known in the United States as the lead in Michel Hazanavicius’ superb silent-film reverie The Artist) is one of those rare performers who combines movie star charisma, the aura of someone who takes the screen by natural right, with an actor’s discernment. He’s an upright hero, neither a dullard nor falsely noble.
A large part of the pleasure of this movie is its handsomeness (midwifed by Pawel Edelman’s rich, dark-toned cinematography), the confidence provided by its assured professionalism that you’re in the hands of people who aren’t going to muck it up. But even as he’s wrapping us in the pleasure of a beautifully executed piece of classical filmmaking, Polanski resists easy conclusions. He ends with the final meeting between Picquart, reinstated at the rank of brigadier general, the rank he would have attained had he not been court-martialed and then resigned, and Dreyfus, whose rank has not been advanced after his imprisonment. Regretfully, Picquart tells Dreyfus that he cannot risk promoting him and thus once again bringing up an explosive matter that’s now been settled. This kind of pragmatism isn’t what we want from our heroes. But where the young Polanski would have taken perverse pleasure in this downbeat note, would have signaled to us that this conditional triumph means nothing, the director’s continued refusal to provide completely happy endings now comes from something deeper and something honorable. It’s not that Polanski doesn’t believe in the possibility of justice; it’s just that he finds it odious to pretend that one triumph means justice for all. And this is where I think we can argue for the pertinence of Polanski’s experience without contradicting the need to separate the art from the artist. Polanski’s experience hasn’t changed. What has changed is the gravity with which he now regards the world’s ever-ready appetite for persecution, and surely part of that is because with age it becomes harder and harder to slough off the memory of not only what you may have endured and inflicted but also what the world continues to inflict. In a body of work in which borders and allegiances shift, in which people are betrayed by the institutions they have been taught to trust, the citizenship that matters in Polanski’s movies is the citizenship conferred by the nation of pain.