This movie is quite something.
86-year-old Roman Polanski has made one of the very best movies of his entire career. No, really. His Venice-winning “An Officer and a Spy” is the real deal. The legendary director has crafted his film with absolute surgical genius. Only a master can make a film as sublimely atmospheric and textural as this one.
Set during “Belle Epoque” Paris, Polanski tackles the notoriously infamous true story of Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel), a French Jew wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment by antisemitic and scapegoating authorities in 1894 France. Dreyfuss was condemned to Devil’s Island by a band of authoritative figures, with the help of a lapdog media all-too-willing to driven their narrative, who tried to suppress the truth. Anyone who questioned the decision to imprison Dreyfuss was smeared as a “conspiracy theorist.” Sounds familiar?
Polanski and Robert Harris’s brilliant screenplay shows more than tells, getting us into the psyche of Georges Picqart (Jean Dujardin in the performance of his career), the intelligence officer who stumbled upon the French military cover-up. Even when Picqart ends up presenting evidence of Dreyfus’ innocence, French authorities refused to budge.
Polanski’s film isn’t only an “anti-racism film,” it’s also a cautionary tale of due process. At a time when social media is dictating what is right and was it wrong, even, at times, without a cinch of evidence to back up their claims, “An Officer and a Spy” hits home because, as you watch the film, you realize that the 19th-century authoritative setting Polanski is presenting to us on-screen is eerily similar to ours. With that in mind, “An Officer and a Spy” is very much intended as a modern-day parable, a movie about the repercussions of groupthink and mob justice.
Shot with a poet’s eye by longtime Polanski DP Pawel Edelman, whose gorgeous frames here are naturally lit, the film has top-notch production values in practically every department. Cue in the incredible production design courtesy of Jean Rabasse, not to mention the stunning art direction by Dominique Moisan and Alexandre Desplat’s sorrowful music, and the film never misses a beat. Polanski’s 127-minute film feels shorter than it is, never wasting a minute to tell its story in minimalist but powerful fashion. This is a procedural, but done in peculiarly unshowy ways.
When Roman Polanski’s "The Ghost Writer" was released in 2010, somebody wrote to the late great film critic Roger Ebert complaining about his decision to see and review a film from an accused pedophile. Ebert replied: "A film is a film. It is good or bad. If I began making moral judgments of directors — or actors, or writers —where would it end?"
Polanski‘s “An Officer and a Spy”, which won the Silver Lion at last month’s Venice Film Festival, will probably never be theatrically distributed and released in the United States. Due to the current socio-political climate in the country, Polanski has been canceled over a late ’70s statutory rape case — the same case which, lest we remember, didn’t stop the Academy from honoring Polanski with their Best Director statuette back in 2003 for the holocaust drama, “The Pianist.”
Is it so surprising that, despite “An Officer and a Spy” winning at Venice and topping polls there as well, American audiences will likely never see Polanski’s great film? Despite garnering glowing reviews in Europe, American critics have, unsurprisingly, panned the film.
“An Officer and a Spy” currently holds a 58% rotten score and 56 score on Metacritic. IndieWire critic David Ehrlich (review), Variety’s Deborah Young (review), Variety’s Owen Gleiberman (review), The Playlist’s Christina Newland (review) and The Wrap’s Alonso Duralde (review) all disliked Polanski’s film. However, Glenn Kenny’s rave for RogerEbert.com was a nice and refreshing read. Kenny stated that the film “has something very real and urgent to say about the world we live in today. It's kind of a shame you'll probably never get to see it.”
Kenny is right. It’s quite ironic that the same powerful forces Polanski is condemning in the movie are the ones who will prevent U.S. audiences from ultimately seeing it.