In France, Roman Polanski’s “An Officer and a Spy” was released in 2019 as “J’Accuse …!” — I accuse. On its face, the movie is an account of the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish-French army captain named Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans in the late 19th century. The movie shared its original title with Émile Zola’s published defense of Dreyfus, which changed both public opinion and history. The accused in Zola’s denunciation is unmistakable. Yet who is the movie — and Polanski — accusing, and of what?
Now, six years after its French run, “An Officer and a Spy” is opening in New York at the Film Forum. It’s the first new Polanski movie to play in this country since the 2014 release of “Venus in Fur.” In the years since, Polanski — who fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor — became effectively persona non grata here. Film Forum has posted a programming note to its website that refers to the assault, and also states that the movie is “a well-crafted, dramatic depiction of the Dreyfus Affair” and “an important contribution to cinema’s crucial role in historical storytelling.”
“An Officer and a Spy” is well-crafted; Polanski’s movies generally are. Its contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling, though, seems largely as an allegory about Polanski.
The movie opens with cinematic sweep, with Dreyfus (a de-glammed Louis Garrel) being ostentatiously stripped of his miliary rank in a degradation ceremony. It’s 1895 and the setting is a vast, austere courtyard of the École Militaire, which was founded by Louis XV. Soldiers and bystanders are in attendance; in the near distance, the recently built Eiffel Tower pierces the gray sky. The tower was built to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution, whose universalist principles — liberté, égalité, fraternité — were extended to all French Jews in 1791, granting them full citizenship.
Questions of identity, patrimony and antisemitism are among the issues swirling through “An Officer and a Spy.” After Dreyfus’s degradation ceremony, he is separated from his family and imprisoned on Devil’s Island, a penal colony in French Guiana where he is the lone inmate and ordered not to speak to the guards. With each affront, Dreyfus is progressively isolated from France, a point Polanski underscores with a stunning series of long shots of Devil’s Island that show it at a greater distance until it disappears from view, like its prisoner. It’s a denigration that, at least symbolically, evokes the Nazis’ methodical dehumanizing actions toward Jews in “The Pianist,” Polanski’s towering 2002 film about the Holocaust.
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