V.winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival of 2019, The officer and the spy is the last, controversial, film by the legendary director Roman Polanski.
Aired tonight at 9.25pm on Rai 3 – protagonists Jean Dujardin, Emmanuelle Seigner and Louis Garrel – he says a fact that really happened in anti-Semitic France of the Belle Epoque, but there is no doubt that the director of Rosemary’s Baby wanted to use the case to illustrate too the present, as well as his personal history.
The officer and the spy, never released in the United States, is in fact a clear indictment – the original title is proper J’accuse – towards everyone the new McCarthyisms and the renewed witch hunts that afflict our contemporaneity.
Where the truth lies, conspiracy the condemnation before verifying the facts. Without renouncing an admirable spectacle of the staging.
The officer and the spy: the plot of the movie
Paris, January 1895. Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), French army officer attends the public condemnation and the humiliating degradation inflicted on Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel), a Jewish captain accused of having been an informer of the German enemies.
The dishonor follows the exile e the sentence that condemns the traitor to be confined to the island of the Devil, in French Guiana.
Jean Dujardin.
The case appears to have been closed and Picquart earns promotion at the head of the Statistics Section, the same military counterintelligence unit that mounted the charges against Dreyfus.
And that’s when that he realizes that the transmission of information to the enemy has not yet stopped. As a man of honor he is the right question: Is Dreyfus Really Guilty?
An autobiographical film?
Based on the acclaimed novel of the same name by Robert Harris, The officer and the spy is first and foremost a magnificent reconstruction of 19th century France, and events of the scandal that will go down in history as “The Dreyfus case”.
Polanski’s skill is to turn the historical drama genre into a thriller, mix director and screenplay by iron. Then aided by superb interpretations.
Thanks to Jean Dujardin, in his best role, and Louis Garrel, Polanski not only makes an anti-racist film – Dreyfus was sentenced without appeal because he was Jewish – but also a warning about due process, fake news and contemporary witch hunts.
At a time when social media, and newspapers as a result, dictate what is right and what is wrong, sometimes with no evidence to back up their claims, the film thus becomes a modern parable. An apologue on the repercussions of the single thought and the justice of the crowd, on how gossip and personal indiscretions can be turned into evidence against reputation.
A mode that Roman knows how .
The controversy at the César and the new film
For several years Roman Polanski has indeed become one of the main targets of the French #MeToo activists. Pedophile rapist when he raped a young girl in Jack Nicholson’s house in 1977. To then escape from safe conviction first in France, and then in Switzerland since 2009. Where is his residence.
What are activists asking for the 88-year-old? Extradition and the rest of his life in a cell. Consequently, each of his films before and after the news, no longer have value or sense; whoever looks at them is conniving and insensitive.
The latest boom of indignation was unleashed when Roman won for The officer and the spy a César, the French equivalent of the Oscars, for best director. With the controversy already started at the nominations, and finally merged in the theatrical exit from the ceremony of the actress Adèle Haenel and companion director Celine Sciamma.
Regardless of the controversy, Polanski is ready to return to the set also thanks to the support of Rai Cinema. The new film is called The Palace, is set on New Year’s Eve 1999, and chronicles the lives of the guests and staff of a large hotel nestled in the Swiss Alps.
Still nothing is known about the cast but Paolo Del Brocco, executive of Rai Cinema, has meanwhile silenced the controversy by declaring: “I know that Polanski brings “trouble”, but we are interested in the artistic side and the quality of the stories, not the personal story ».
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