Why I accuse Polanski is an ambiguous and powerful film: our criticism

The controversial French filmmaker received the César for the best director for his vision of the Dreyfus affair. To be reviewed this evening on France 3.

Critique initially published in Première No. 501, released on October 30, 2019.

France 3 broadcasts this Monday evening I accuseof Polanski novel. A historical film carried by Jean Dujardin,, Louis Garrel And Emmanuelle Seignerwhich had led to a scandal during the César the following year, when the filmmaker accused of rape was rewarded for the prize for the best director.

César 2020: Polanski discomfort

Where is hidden Polanski novel In I accusede ? What echoes of his own ” affair “ Do we hear in his story of the Dreyfus affair? We would like to be able to watch this film by avoiding hazardous parallels, in “Separating the man from the artist” (as they say). But the task is made difficult by the press kit, in which Pascal Bruckner, interviewing Polanski, allows himself a lamentable comparison between the Nazi then Stalinist persecutions suffered by the filmmaker in the past and the “Neo-feminist McCarthym »(Sic) who “Change around the world” Today. In response, Polanski says he knows some of the “Rooms of the persecution system” who were at work in the Dreyfus affair.

If we wanted to see I accuse Without the author’s face overlapping images, it is missed. Especially since Polanski in person appears without screaming in the heart of the film, via a Hitchcockian cameo, a striking signature effect: appearing for the time of a beat of Cil in an anti -cheerful living room where we sip champagne, the air satisfied and repute, in an academician. Is it a cinema costume, moreover, or his own dress as a member of the Academy of Fine Arts? The plan works in any case as a reminder of the first (brilliant) scene of the film, the degradation of Dreyfus, where the soldier accused of betrayal is removed from his officer’s insignia in the courtyard of the military school. The sky is threatening, but the humiliated man keeps his head high. It is impossible not to think about the fact that Polanski has recently been dismissed from the Oscar Academy – a decision he disputes before the courts. Definitely, no, we don’t get out …

Back to efficiency
However, Polanski, who has never been very inclined to seek traces of his life in his work (the rest of the world takes care of it), does not focus so much in I accuse On Dreyfus (Louis Garrel), the scapegoat Jew condemned by the blind crowd, that on Picquart, the lieutenant-colonel who denounced the conspiracy and helped to make the truth triumph. A fascinating, gruff and obstinate character, camped in a very powerful way by a massive Dujardin jeans, with drawn features, worthy descendant of the JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson) of Chinatown. In an exceptional implementation, where Polanski’s cinema has regained lost efficiency since The Ghost Writerwe are in a delectable, Supremely Polanskian detective film: a man, guided by his conscience, evolves in a rotten, sick universe, eagerness, where state plots are tinkered in dark and stinking corridors. The photo of Pawel Edelman assumes a form of aggressive ugliness, chatting a metallic world, cold, bad. A dying world.

Trap
It skates a little more in the second part, when we go to another genre (the trial film) and accelerates the parade of second mustachi roles played by known actors (Melvil Poupaud, Denis Podalydès, Vincent Perez …). The director and his coscenarist, Robert Harris, have a considerable mass of information to brew here, and do not entirely escape the stiffness of the historical reconstruction. I accuses it seems to be torn between the two faces of Polanski cinema: devious and twisted on one side, more academic and mainstream on the other. But even in its hollow moments, the film is innervated by a vision so acerbic and sharp from human nature that interest never weakens. It ends on the least comforting conclusion possible, a false happy end devoured by bitterness. A good Polanski film, as we know, is a labyrinth of which our mind remains a prisoner. This one is full of shot and gray areas, and we are far from having found the key.

The exclusion of Oscar Polanski novel is confirmed by justice