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J’accuse (Roman Polanski, 2019)
Roman Polanski’s life experience is predicated upon violence and absurdity. As an accused and convicted sex offender on the lam for nearly half a century, Polanski is toxic, although it has taken a while for Hollywood to admit it.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expelled him 15 years after bestowing an Oscar (and a standing O) on him for his 2002 Holocaust film The Pianist. More recently, to avoid printing his name, the Paris Theater’s social-media ad cited no director for Polanski’s 1988 thriller Frantic, acknowledging only co-screenwriter Robert Towne. Now, six years after winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, J’accuse, the director’s career-capping treatment of the Dreyfus Affair, tiptoes into town, still without a distributor.
So, is J’accuse (je proteste the movie’s vanilla English title, An Officer and a Spy) worth seeing or even thinking about? The subject is hardly irrelevant in our current political climate. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, one of the few Jewish officers in the French Army, was framed for treason and hastily convicted by a kangaroo court; soon after he was sentenced to life in solitary confinement, spending most of it on an island off the coast of French Guiana. The trumped-up charge, the brazen cover-up, the escalating hullabaloo that included putting Dreyfus’s defenders (notably Émile Zola, from whose famous open letter the film takes its title) on trial, and a second outrageous conviction convulsed France for a decade while the world looked on in wonderment.
The Affair, as characterized by author Nicholas Halazs in his classic 1955 account Captain Dreyfus, was “a crazy structure of forgeries and lies built on nothing for no reason, a nightmare dreamed during a nightmare.” Inflamed by the jingo press and supported by the Catholic Church, the French public embraced Dreyfus’s guilt, even as other nations recognized his innocence. Not for nothing did Halasz subtitle his book “The Story of a Mass Hysteria.”
Polanski could not have known how closely the Affair might presage ascendent currents in American society. Still, when announcing a film about Dreyfus as a follow-up to his paranoid political thriller The Ghost Writer (2010)—to be co-written, as that one was, with novelist Robert Harris—he noted that as an account of deep-state shenanigans and persecution exacerbated by a rabid news media, it did seem au courant.
Or maybe quotidian. Few directors have more reason to believe in humanity’s innate depravity. A Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Poland (whose family returned from France on the eve of war), Polanski survived a feral childhood. His mother was killed at Auschwitz. He escaped from Poland’s drab postwar police state to France and England, and then to the glitz of Hollywood where Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by a messianic cult—a crime for which, as the director of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), he was ludicrously suspected. Success, however, allowed him ample opportunity for payback. Polanski specialized in frightening movie audiences. He also felt entitled to abuse young women. In 1977, he was arrested and convicted for the rape of a 13-year-old girl, and subsequently fled the U.S. to escape imprisonment.
Is adapting the Dreyfus Affair, then, a means by which Polanski might ponder his own history (as victim and victimizer)? Did he identify with an innocent Jew whose Kafkaesque persecution anticipated and likely inspired Kafka? (The Dreyfus Affair seems reflected in The Trial and In the Penal Colony.) Polanski did cast himself as a Kafkaesque antihero in his most personal film, The Tenant (1976). It’s also suggestive that J’accuse was originally to be called D and made in Poland. But in a joke not even Larry David could imagine, the project was delayed when, acting on a U.S. request for his extradition, Polish authorities arrested Polanski in Warsaw at the opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
Exhibit A in Poland, Polanski bolted back to France, and in finishing the movie there, became the most distinguished French-born filmmaker to address the historic cause célèbre since Georges Méliès made his censored serial, The Dreyfus Affair, in 1899. Not that the subject had been untouched in the interim. France banned the 1930 German production Dreyfus (attacked by a pre-Führer Adolf Hitler as Jewish propaganda) and its 1931 British remake of the same name. Although the word “Jew” was never spoken on screen, Warner Bros.’s 1937 Oscar-winning, anti-fascist The Life of Emile Zola was proscribed in France until 1952. Even José Ferrer’s grotesquely Francophilic I Accuse! (1958)—adapted from Halasz by Gore Vidal and starring the director himself as Dreyfus—was similarly verboten.
France has not responded well to foreign criticism of its national past. (What country has?) Still, its suppression of Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) is not an isolated case. Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 Paths of Glory (which can be read as a crypto-Dreyfus film) was banned for 15 years. Andrzej Wadja’s Danton (1983) outraged the French left, including President François Mitterrand, whose government helped bankroll the film. But if Dreyfus was still off-limits in France, Polanski was perhaps a Derridean pharmakon—at once poison and cure.
A grande artiste produced a heritage film that belonged to the “tradition de qualité.” North American and British distributors passed on J’accuse, but, in another twist of the Polanskian dialectic, the movie was gratefully received in France—until it wasn’t, thanks to Polanski. On the eve of the film’s premiere at Venice, a clueless interviewer suggested that Polanski identified with his movie’s blameless, persecuted victim—and the arrogant filmmaker seemed to agree. This blithe assertion prompted the actress Valentine Monnier to publish her own enraged “j’accuse,” revealing that nearly 45 years prior Polanski had raped and physically assaulted her when she was a teenager.
Monnier was not the first woman to accuse Polanski of sexual violence publicly (there had been at least five before her), but as the first French woman to do so, she took her story straight to France’s first lady Brigitte Macron. The resultant uproar was such that Polanski dared not show his face at the annual Césars ceremony where J’accuse was nominated for 12 awards (and given three, including two for Polanski, as director and co-writer). Would it have made any difference if his film had been titled Mea Culpa?
How much better to be attacked à la Dreyfus as “an agent of international Jewry” than exposed yet again as a serial rapist. The irony, if that’s the word, is that Polanski the filmmaker in no way identifies with Dreyfus, positioned in his movie as a colorless, characterless pawn (played by Louis Garrel). Rather than the man, J’accuse is essentially concerned with the clumsy machinations of a militarized bureaucracy and the use value of xenophobic anti-Semitism. The idiotic army blames everything on a Jewish conspiracy as crowds burn books and bray for blood.
J’accuse is historically accurate (filming locations include the actual courtroom where Dreyfus’s trial took place), and its production values are impeccable, not least in the sarcasm with which Polanski pays visual homage to the revered French painting (Manet, Caillebotte, Toulouse-Lautrec) that coincided with the state’s shabby frame. And yet, a tale so bleak requires a positive hero. As Hollywood drafted Dreyfus’s journalist defender, Zola, so Polanski seizes upon Colonel Georges Picquart, an anti-Semite who disliked Dreyfus at first, but once placed in charge of counterespionage, felt obliged to follow the evidence and declare the Jew innocent. (We know that Picquart is the hero here because Polanski gives him a cloying love affair with a character played by Mme. Polanski, Emmanuelle Seigner.)
Picquart also had an absurd destiny, defending Dreyfus so stubbornly that he too was tried and imprisoned for more than a year. At a crucial moment in the film, Picquart urges Dreyfus not to cop a plea. To accept a pardon is to admit a wrong (spoiler alert: D does so anyway). Here the curtain parts: Polanski will never confess. Guilt, shmuilt. He has cast himself, à la Picquart, as the heroic, albeit flawed, Frenchman whose only crime, as he sees it, is daring to tell the truth.
J. Hoberman is the author of Everything is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop.
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