“I don’t separate the man from the art. I think that important aspects of the work emerge in the man.” So said Lucrecia Martel, the Argentine filmmaker and president of this year’s Venice Film Fest…
The movie, adapted from a 2013 historical novel by Robert Harris, who co-wrote the script with Polanski , 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.Dreyfus was, in fact, an innocent man who was railroaded.
It might be a leap of conjecture to say that Polanski, dogged by the accusations that resulted in his own trial, and exile from Hollywood, 42 years ago, now sees himself in the figure of Alfred Dreyfus. But it doesn’t have to be conjecture, because Polanski has been explicit about it. 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.
It’s meticulous production, made with robust confidence by the 86-year-old director, and I wish I could say it was Polanski working at peak form. But it’s a film that tells you things more than it gets you to feel them. Early on, he gets a promotion, becoming the head of French intelligence. This makes for an arresting depiction of what spying looked like a century ago — because, of course, we now tend to associate espionage with technology. But as Picquart moves into his office in Paris, surrounded by the smell of the sewer, a window that won’t open, and underlings who look at him with hooded glares, as though he were a foreign agent, we’re eager to know how it all works.
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