When I first saw this picture in the late summer of 2019, at the Venice Film Festival, I waxed persistently pessimistic about its prospects of ever being screened in the United States. The film’s director and co-screenwriter (with Robert Harris, adapting his own novel), Roman Polanski, is a well-known fugitive from United States justice, and the crime is rape. To bring up nothing more than his name is to invite disapprobation and argument.
The thing is that since he moved to France in the late 1970s, he has continued making films, some of them—most of them, actually—very good, and a couple of them better than very good. (One of the latter, “The Pianist,” in fact earned him a Best Director Academy Award.) As it happens, his most recent film, an attempted comedy called “The Palace,” is excruciatingly bad. And several efforts have either not gotten U.S. distribution at all, or spotty releases (see, his eccentric 2013 adaptation of David Ives’ play “Venus in Furs,” which, as it happens, is now streaming all over the place).
“An Officer and a Spy” is one of Polanski’s finest pictures, which means it’s very fine indeed. The film treats the infamous late-19th-century Dreyfus Affair, in which French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was scapegoated, court-martialed, and exiled to Devil’s Island despite being entirely innocent of the charges against him. He got sent up essentially because he was Jewish, and the rank and file could make a potential embarrassment caused by another officer’s treason simply go away. Other films have told the story—1937’s compromised classic “The Life of Emile Zola” chronicles the famous French author’s role in the convoluted case—but the perspective here makes the most crucial difference.
“Officer” takes the perspective of, yes, an officer. Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart had taught Albert Dreyfus in military school. An antisemite himself, Picquart had a particular personal dislike for Dreyfus. He is seen here as being not particularly displeased when the man was sent into banishment. Reporting to his superiors about watching Dreyfus stripped of the buttons on his uniform as part of his sentence’s “degradation,” he says it felt to him that the Army was being stripped of “a pestilence.”
He’s sent up the army’s ladder, taking over a section of its intelligence division, and here he learns how egregiously Dreyfus had been framed. He doesn’t want to believe what he learns about the rot in the army’s judicial system. (One is reminded of the superior officers depicted in Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,” whose character moves Kirk Douglas to call one of them a “degenerate.”)
Jean Dujardin, who’s best known here for a still-controversial performance in Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist,” is utterly flawless as Picquart, maintaining proper military bearing even as he begins to seethe with indignation. As the worm-like adjutant Colonel Henry, Grégory Gadebois is loathsome, until he turns tragic. Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner is amiable as Picquart’s mistress; Mathieu Amalric is as reliably deft as ever; Melvil Poupaud is explosive in a late-picture entry. The most daring interpretation is Louis Garrel as Dreyfus, who makes no attempt to ingratiate. He’s an ice-cold character here, and one senses this is a survival strategy for the man.
When I reviewed it at Venice, I summed up thusly: “The jazz pianist Carla Bley said of Count Basie that he was ‘the final arbiter of how to play two notes; the distance between them and the volume of them is perfect. I can’t hold myself to that standard, but I can appreciate it.’ When he’s really on his game, as he is here, Polanski can be said to be the final arbiter of how to compose a film frame, how to choreograph what moves within it, how to move the frame itself, and when to go to another shot. In addition to that, ‘J’accuse’ has something very real and urgent to say about the world we live in today.” My last thought is, I think, even more the case today than it was in 2019.
As to why we’re running THIS review now, well. If you’re a New Yorker, you can actually see the movie on a big screen, at Film Forum, where it’s being presented under the auspices of not the venue itself but “with support from the Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film and The Joan S. Constantiner Fund for Jewish and Holocaust Films.” The ticket-buying app has a disclaimer from Film Forum acknowledging “the complicated debate surrounding the presentation of work by artists with controversial or problematic histories.” And more than one critic has argued that in telling the tale of Dreyfus, Polanski is pleading his own case, which I think is opportunistic nonsense. In any case, you can now decide for yourself.
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