Polanski plods his way to catharsis
An Officer and a Spy Cert TBC, 126min ★★★★★ Dir Roman Polanski Starring Jean Dujardin, Louis Garrel, Emmanuelle Seigner, Gregory Gadebois, Hervé Pierre, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud
When it was announced that Roman Polanski would be bringing his new film about the Dreyfus affair to the Venice Film Festival – though not in person, thanks to the extradition treaty between Italy and the US – it was widely supposed that the story must hold for its director a certain personal resonance.
Naturally, there was outrage that this 42-year fugitive from justice had been selected in the first place: Polanski has been living in exile in Europe since pleading guilty in a Los Angeles court in 1977 to unlawful sex with a minor. But he clearly sees the subject of his latest film as something of a kindred spirit. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain in fin-de-siècle France, found himself shipped off to a South American penal colony in 1894 after being wrongly convicted in a scandalous espionage case, and was only exonerated following a public outcry led by the writer Émile Zola. Exactly how much common ground the two cases share is up for debate. (I’ll concede the two are both Jewish.)
In an interview in the press notes accompanying the film, Polanski notes
that his familiarity with “the workings of the apparatus of persecution” helped shape his on-screen treatment of the Dreyfus case.
Yet though An Officer and a Spy is a personal film for Polanski, it doesn’t much look or act like one. This is a sober, stiff-collared procedural, handsomely shot but also oddly bloodless until the more conventional paranoid-thriller rhythms of its final act kick in. The only recurring image that feels from the heart are the rows of caricaturish faces that stare in sombre, silent, and as it turns out completely ill-founded judgment during the crowd and courtroom scenes – the subtext of each one being see how you like it.
Dreyfus himself, played by Louis Garrel, is a relatively marginal figure in the script by Robert Harris. Instead, the plot centres on Colonel Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), the army intelligence chief who unravels the charges against Dreyfus in the face of resistance from his superiors.
Dujardin plays the role as pokerstraight as Picquart’s rank requires, while his long nose and thick whiskers make him look like a figure from a Toulouse-lautrec painting.
By the very nature of the story, the best parts arrive late: a foot chase, the retrial, the rousing Zola stuff, a sabre duel with the taurine Major Henry (a terrific, steam-snorting Grégory Gadebois). Before then, the investigation is painstaking, the pace heavy footed. The film pours out its catharsis like concrete: you have to wait for it to set. RC