A "Sneak Preview" for American Viewers of Roman Polanski's J'Accuse (aka An Officer and a Spy) (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Robert Koehler

Produced by Alain Goldman; directed by Roman Polanski; screenplay by Robert Harris and Roman Polanski, based on Harris’s novel; cinematography by Pawel Edelman; production design by Jean Rabasse; costumes by Pascaline Chavanne; edited by Hervé De Luze; music by Alexandre Desplat; starring Jean Dujardin, Louis Garrel, Emmanuelle Seigner, Grégory Gadebois, Hervé Pierre, Wladimir Yordanoff, Didier Sandre, Melvil Poupaud, Damien Bonnard, Denis Podalydès, Eric Ruf, Mathieu Almaric, Laurent Stocker, Vincent Perez, Vincent Grass. Color, 132 min., French dialogue with English subtitles. International Sales, Playtime https://cineuropa.org/intsale/26603/

We seem to have arrived at a point in the decades-long Polanski Affair where the wise and abiding—well, maybe now not so abiding—adage, “Trust the art and not the artist,” no longer applies. It might shock sophisticates and the well read to know that there will be thousands, eventually even millions of viewers of Polanski’s new movie, An Officer and A Spy, who won’t make any dark association between the writer-director and his movie. It’s fair to reckon that even most informed viewers under, say, thirty, who might only vaguely know Polanski’s name at all won’t know that the filmmaker carries a weighty train of scandal behind him. Multiple accusations of statutory rape. Conviction. A brief prison term in Switzerland. A fugitive from U.S. justice. To this day, and in a lengthy and often defensive interview in a December issue of Paris Match shortly after the movie’s French premiere in November 2019, Polanski both acknowledges the substance of his time served and denies multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault for which he’s never been tried and convicted. The paradox of all of this is that the cloud of Polanski’s past personal life and the young lives he appears to have damaged will obscure a proper critical perspective on his work—for viewers generally past a certain age that is.

Before An Officer and A Spy won four prizes at the 2019 Venice Film Festival (including the Silver Lion and FIPRESCI prize), jury president Lucrecia Martel stated in so many words that when it came to Polanski, she could probably no longer trust the art and not the artist. Martel, as good a filmmaker as we have anywhere in the world, didn’t seem to be making the kind of provocative hay that big-time festival jury presidents sometimes like to make at opening day press conferences; she was stating a principle, even if it looked like it was one with which most artists, if pressed, would probably disagree.

After all, the history of art is full of moral monsters, artists who commit heinous acts and create great, enduring works. Can we reject wholesale Ezra Pound’s poetry based on his fascist politics? Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, still one of the most titanic works of cultural history in English, spends nearly six hundred pages arguing with a resounding voice that this is impossible. Do Chaplin’s scandals with underage girls disqualify him as one of the supreme artists of cinema and possibly the giant of the silent era? Does Miles Davis’s documented history as a wife-beater cancel his greatness as the key artist in modern jazz history? Political voices on the left and right continue to try to negate great novelists’ bodies of work—for example, rightwing attacks on Gabriel García Marquez and left-wing targeting of Mario Vargas Llosa. Can Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s early Soviet masterpieces be viewed as defenses of an incipient totalitarian state? Leni Reifenstahl’s of Nazism? They can. And they can also be the makers of great cinema.

The debate is both endless and a nonstarter. I love Martel’s cinema and also disagree with her position; and I respect Martel more deeply now that her jury, after all that, deservedly gave An Officer and A Spy the Silver Lion. Perhaps her jury, seeing more clearly than many observers in those stormy days in Venice, fathomed the movie’s intelligent precision and quiet emotion that guides every minute of its storytelling, and how its form and substance represent the exact opposite of gossip rage, tabloid bloviating, and dramatic public stances. Polanski’s co-writer and the author of the novel of the same title, Robert Harris, must share credit for this precision and tenor. Harris, after all, also wrote the last excellent Polanski production, The Ghost Writer (2010), with a similar balance of exactitude and emotional texture. This is why the early Venice reviews were generally so wrong: beyond the problem of some of the Anglo-Saxon critics falling into the trap of allowing the Polanski Affair to color their view of this movie about the after-effect and resolution of the Dreyfus Affair, they tended to dismiss the movie as a bloodless procedural, a mechanical work of dutiful history telling.

This is an odd misreading, since the first surprise for those who know their Dreyfus Affair business is that An Officer and A Spy isn’t about Dreyfus (Louis Garrel), but Lt. Col. Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), the man who uncovered the gross injustice and manipulated conviction that led to Dreyfus’s court martial and imprisonment. The engine of Harris’s and Polanski’s story is Picquart’s building sense of outrage—necessarily contained within the highly proscribed conduct and protocols of the late-nineteenth-century French Army—that an officer with an unblemished record was the victim of systematic anti-Semitism.

The opening scene captures the iconic moment of the Dreyfus Affair, when the defrocked officer is forced to stand in the courtyard of Paris’s École Militaire surrounded by hundreds of troops in perfect (and in Polanski’s hands, sinister) alignment and watch as his Captain’s epaulettes, braids, and stripes are stripped from his uniform and his sword is ceremonially snapped in two. Only after Dreyfus is shipped off to prison on remote Devil’s Island does Picquart enter the picture, and through him, the Dreyfus Affair plot is backfilled in a chain of flashbacks. This can often be a creaky, mechanical way to tell a complicated story, particularly a piece of distant history. But with visually interesting techniques and Polanski’s insistence on an immediacy to the action—as if every moment is in the here and now, without a shred of historical gauze—neither the flashbacks nor the forward-moving action of Picquart’s gradual discovery of the truth behind Dreyfus’s unjust court martial feel stuck in the mire of re-creation. 

It’s worth noting here a common link between An Officer and A Spy and Albert Serra’s own period drama (currently in virtual theatrical U.S. release through The Cinema Guild), Liberté. On the surface, the movies couldn’t seem less similar: Polanski’s movie creates a thoroughly realistic world whose richness of details from street life to the latest nineteenth-century technology amount to one of the supreme pleasures watching it; Serra’s work is resolutely anti-realist, based on his stage play about a clandestine group of allies of the Marquis de Sade and others who aim to hatch a rebellion on the eve of the French Revolution, and radically staged in a forest glen with few period accoutrements beyond some carriages and costumes. Yet both arrive at a common truth, which is cinema’s capacity for present-ness. Bazin’s examination of cinema’s photographic essence, and thus its affinity for the real, is demonstrated in both movies in stark relief.

The results are not just to thrust the past to the present, but to envelop the viewer in the thinking that defined that past. Serra’s Sadean players, operating in a space beyond good and evil and prisoners of their own bodies, play out their most radical gestures according to that era’s slower cultural rhythms, which Serra makes us, as viewers, adopt. In the same way, Polanski’s and Harris’s characters, similarly fixed in history, proceed in modes of behavior and speech that never feel pushed into a modern syntax, but according to their own present, which then becomes our own. While certain masterpieces, from Carné’s Children of Paradise to Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, conceive of their stories’ past through a retrospective gaze, An Officer and A Spy and its useful current, and unlikely, companion, Liberté, manage the arguably harder trick of reversing that gaze. (Notably, Martel herself executed this same filmmaking trick with her most recent work, Zama.)

As in several of Harris’s novels, the heart of the action in An Officer and A Spy is a detective story, and Dujardin—like most of Polanski’s star-filled cast, almost unrecognizable in beard and period makeup—adheres to his character’s stoic manner as he uncovers the truth. Dujardin is in nearly every scene, underlining the movie’s fascinating nature as a chamber drama often played out in cramped offices, spacious generals’ quarters, living rooms, hallways, staircases, and lobbies. Some of Polanski’s best work in the 1960s, including Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, transformed enclosed spaces into whole worlds roiling with disturbing and evil forces, and while The Ghost Writer also worked at this scale, An Officer and A Spy pushes this sense to an extreme, while never feeling overtly claustrophobic.

But in the course of his investigation and encounter with France’s centers of corrupt power, Picquart’s journey vividly recalls Jake Gittes’s own journey to the heart of evil Los Angeles in Polanski’s Chinatown. That movie appears to have been at the forefront of the director’s thinking and in his conversations with Harris, who wrote his novel as a kind of blueprint for the movie to follow. Picquart can often feel here to be a sort of Chandler-esque figure, stumbling upon the unexpected and discovering dark truths in his quest; Chandler thought of Marlowe’s work as the actions of a noble knight warring against evil, and the image perfectly describes Dujardin’s characterization. Like Gittes, Picquart climbs the ladders of power in his world, and his discovery isn’t one of simply a crude anti-Semitism within which the Dreyfus Affair is usually defined, but of a dogged preservation of particular French ideas of L’État and esprit de corps as essential to a hold on power by any means necessary. This was the truth expressed in Emile Zola’s infamous, immortal broadside J’Accuse (the movie’s French title), which is read on the soundtrack in one of the movie’s rare montages. The movie has been building to this moment, a cri du coeur, and then, revenge by the system designed to preserve itself.

In this way, for a few sequences, An Officer and A Spy would seem to be as equally as dark as the ending of Chinatown, with its sense of perversion always getting away with it. (Not unlike the feeling of many critics and victims of Polanski.) But fate, and history, would smile more ironically on Picquart than Gittes, and the final pleasure of Polanski’s new movie is how the wheels of politics can bend toward a kind of actual justice. Even less than The Pianist, An Officer and A Spy never plays as a Hollywood movie set and made in Europe, and this is crystallized in the final scene, where Garrel’s Dreyfus encounters Picquart one last time in an unexpected setting, their positions and destinies altered.

Is it a happy ending? It isn’t played that way. The weight of the world is felt by these men, nearly ground down by the power of it, and the wear and tear now play out on their faces. Perhaps justice will never, can never, be fully realized. Perhaps it’s a dream, and that we must accept the little that we get of it. Polanski could make a fine adaptation of a John Le Carré novel, which is the highest praise I can think of for An Officer and A Spy.

Despite its Venice Film Festival awards and its twelve nominations at the 2019 César Awards (France’s equivalent of the Academy Awards) and four wins for Best Adaptation, Best Costume Design, and Best Director, An Officer and a Spy has yet to be acquired by a U.S. distributor and no English-subtitled DVD or Blu-ray editions are available. An English-subtitled trailer for the film can be seen on YouTube here.

Robert Koehler is a Contributing Writer for Cineaste and also writes film criticism and journalism for Cinema Scope, Variety, DGA Quarterly, and Sight & Sound.

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