10/2/2023 0 Comments Alfred dreyfus wife and children![]() Polanski did not devise this approach to the Dreyfus Affair on his own. But Picquart, played ably by Jean Dujardin, appears in nearly every scene. Dreyfus (Louis Garrel) does surface frequently, mostly depicted in moments of mute agony. This is not quite Hamlet without the prince. Instead, Polanski’s hero is the intelligence officer Georges Picquart, whose efforts forced the reopening of the case after Dreyfus had departed to serve his life sentence, leading eventually to Dreyfus’s pardon in 1899 and then his exoneration in 1906. Captain Alfred Dreyfus also comes off in the film as an unsympathetically stiff, awkward, neurasthenic character (a harsh interpretation, although one with some basis in fact). It is, then, perhaps no coincidence that he made the film in such a way that the character he identifies with has a distinctly secondary role. Polanski knows perfectly well that much of his past conduct-several other women have also credibly accused him of sexual abuse-will not stand close scrutiny. The problem is not just that Polanski equates Dreyfus’s terrible suffering with his own, far less severe legal experiences (although he has, in his life, known terrible trauma: as a child, he barely survived the Holocaust that took the lives of most of his Polish Jewish family, and in 1969 the Charles Manson gang gruesomely murdered his wife Sharon Tate). But Polanski’s identification with Dreyfus, and his desire to expose what he called, in the interview, an “apparatus of persecution” similar to the one he believes he persecuted him, taints the film. Suspensefully paced, featuring superb acting (notably Grégory Gadebois as the repulsive Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry), and set in a lush, scrupulously accurate, if somewhat stereotyped recreation of fin-de-siècle France (complete with Can-Can dancers and a déjeuner sur l’herbe), it fully reflects Polanski’s seasoned ability to craft compulsively watchable cinema. It is also an expert piece of film making. ![]() And who can watch Woody Allen’s Manhattan, with its portrayal of a sexual relationship between a middle-aged character based on and played by Allen himself, and a high school girl, and not think of Allen’s own deeply troubling sexual history? An Officer and a Spy might seem to have little to do with Roman Polanski’s past conduct. Rudyard Kipling’s irresistibly readable verse is riddled with casual racism and praise for some of the ugliest aspects of British imperialism. Ezra Pound’s hauntingly beautiful “Pisan Cantos” contain nasty anti-Semitic passages, which acquire all the more significance in light of Pound’s pro-Axis propaganda broadcasts during World War II. But the artists themselves sometimes make the distinction too difficult to sustain. Without such a distinction, we might have to cancel a large portion of the world’s great art and literature. In principle, it is a good thing to distinguish the artist from the art, and to refrain from condemning the latter simply because of the former’s conduct or opinions. The sympathetic interviewer attributed the director’s travails to “neo-feminist McCarthyism.” Press materials circulated for his film An Officer and a Spy, about the Dreyfus Affair, included an interview in which Polanski explicitly compared himself to Dreyfus, the French Jewish army officer unjustly convicted in 1895 of spying for Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Roman Polanski? Needless to say, the Polish-born director, who fled the United States in 1978 after being indicted for the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, does not belong in the company of these other victims. ![]() Think of famous victims of injustice in modern history: Thomas More, Galileo, Jean Calas, Alfred Dreyfus, Roman Polanski.
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