Roman Polanski’s Self-Centered “An Officer and a Spy”

The prime parallel between the movie “An Officer and a Spy” and the life of its director, Roman Polanski, is obvious but inexact. The film, whose original French title is “J’Accuse,” tells the story of the French captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was wrongly convicted of treason, in 1894. (Dreyfus was Jewish, and antisemitic prejudice played a large role in the false charge that he had sold military secrets to Germany.) And, as is widely known, in 1977, Polanski, who was working in Hollywood, pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, and, shortly before sentencing, fled to his native France, which does not extradite its citizens and where he has been based ever since. So far, so predictable. But the movie’s more substantial convergences with Polanski’s personal situation are less obvious, though far more deeply rooted in the aesthetic that has governed his directing career.

The movie, which Polanski wrote with the British novelist Robert Harris (on whose 2013 novel it’s based), starts not with Dreyfus’s arrest or conviction but with his cashiering ceremony, in the courtyard of the École Militaire, in Paris. As the insignias are cut off his uniform and his sword broken, Dreyfus (played by Louis Garrel) loudly declares his innocence, both to his brothers-in-arms and to the braying public outside the gates. The drama, for all that it depends on personal prejudice and official misconduct, is rooted in reputational damage, in the notion of honor unduly besmirched and the desire of the victim of injustice to restore his good name—and to restore his place in the Army, the institution that he loves.

In Polanski’s drama, Dreyfus is a supporting character in his own story. The movie’s protagonist is Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), the officer whose investigations eventually helped exonerate Dreyfus, though he was not especially well disposed toward him. Picquart had been one of Dreyfus’s professors at the academy; in a flashback, Dreyfus challenges a low grade given by Picquart, accusing him of antisemitic prejudice. Picquart denies this but, during the cashiering, he makes an antisemitic remark. The following year, Picquart is promoted to lieutenant colonel and put in charge of the Army’s intelligence section. In his new job, he examines a key piece of evidence—the infamous bordereau, a letter advertising to the Germans the availability of French military information—and starts to doubt Dreyfus’s guilt, instead suspecting another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy (Laurent Natrella), of having written it. Picquart reopens the investigation and pushes for a retrial, butting heads with his superiors and with a disloyal, antisemitic subordinate (Grégory Gadebois)—ultimately derailing his military career in the pursuit of justice.

There’s something repellent about the idea of Polanski likening himself cinematically to Dreyfus, but it’s a comparison that is deeply built into his film, if not from its inception then at least in its early stages. He started planning the movie with Harris in 2012, and intended to begin shooting later that year, citing the case’s “absolute relevance to what is happening in today’s world” (with reference to such matters as “security paranoia” and “a rabid press,” but without explicit reference to himself). In 2013, with the film still in development, he specifically related its theme—“the insistence with which the media, like the Army at the time or like any state institution, doesn’t want to admit a mistake”—to times when, he said, “a newspaper, a magazine, makes a mistake regarding me or writes lies.”

In any case, without regard to Polanski’s declarations, “An Officer and a Spy” suggests one significant parallel that goes beyond mere legal guilt or innocence to the notion of honor, of contempt at a personal level and rejection at a professional level. By the time Polanski had started filming—in November, 2018—things had changed for him in France. At the start of 2017, after he was chosen to host France’s César Awards (the country’s equivalent of the Oscars), the response by French feminists was so immediate and vehement that he declined the invitation. In October, the journalist Sandra Muller launched #BalanceTonPorc (denounce your pig), France’s equivalent of #MeToo. Later the same month, a retrospective of Polanski’s films at the Cinémathèque Française sparked protests, too; when he appeared in the hall, two members of the feminist activist group Femen interrupted the event to decry his presence.

It’s impossible to know whether the script of “An Officer and a Spy” changed over the years. But, of course, so much of movie directing isn’t a matter of what’s in the script but how it’s put onscreen—a matter of tone, of emphasis, of tempo, of the rhythm of editing. The film’s main thematic constant, even its dramatic linchpin, is the distinction between private and public life, and the fundamental violation that results from breaking the boundaries between them. The subject comes up early on, when the intelligence division’s over-all commander, General Gonse (Hervé Pierre), offering Picquart the promotion, asks in passing whether he’s married,and, learning that he isn’t, asks why not—adding, “Nothing that might expose you to blackmail?” Exactly what this means is shown soon thereafter: the German military attaché to whom Dreyfus was alleged to have passed confidential information is having an affair with his Italian-military counterpart—an affair that, the story suggests, is of no concern to the French government or to anyone else.

In the film, the principal accusation against Dreyfus was furnished by a cleaning woman who, instead of throwing out the torn-up contents of the German attaché’s waste basket, gave it to the intelligence division; the bordereau wrongly attributed to Dreyfus was found there, in pieces, and reassembled in the division’s offices. As for what’s private and what’s public, Picquart is appalled to observe two officers whose full-time job is opening and reading purloined mail: “Private letters?” he asks; “Not anymore,” he’s told. (Underlining the issue, he later questions the scrutiny of private correspondence again.) Although Picquart’s elaborate investigation itself involves espionage, it’s a wrong to right a wrong, a fighting of fire with fire. In effect, “An Officer and a Spy,” looking askance at the probing of private lives, not only endorses, by analogy, the notion of separating artists from their art but also goes further—it signals that no one has any right to even know more about artists than their public statements and deeds. That’s why, despite the movie’s French title, Émile Zola’s famous open letter “J’Accuse” is relegated to a brief and incidental sidebar, as is the bombshell front-page publication in a newspaper of a leaked copy of the hitherto secret bordereau—the handiwork of professional snoopers and scolds.

But the movie’s ideal of hermetic privacy is embodied, above all, by Polanski’s aesthetic, his cinematic sensibility and feeling for film form. The rapidity and the terseness of the onscreen action leaps from scene to scene, from event to event, from one salient point to the next, with nothing incidental in between, nothing revealing anything besides what directly elucidates the story as Polanski chooses to tell it. The movie keeps viewers’ heads pointed straight ahead and fits them with blinkers. The cool rush of the editing, the narrow precision of the compositions, the terse chopping of scenes to their minimal dosing of information, is an artful declaration to keep moving along, nothing to see here, none of your business. Rather than reconsidering history by intimate acquaintance with a lesser-known hero, it turns its hero into a stick figure no more personalized, complex, or contextualized than a comic-book creation. Far from arousing curiosity, the movie forecloses it.

It didn’t work. In August, 2019, Polanski gave an interview for the Venice Film Festival première of “An Officer and a Spy” in which he affirmed its personal import: “In the story, I sometimes find moments I have experienced myself, I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done.” (In the twenty-tens, four women had accused Polanski of sexual misconduct in the nineteen-seventies and eighties; he has denied the allegations.) Then, in November, 2019, days before the French release of the movie, the photographer Valentine Monnier publicly accused Polanski of beating and raping her, in Switzerland, in 1975. Polanski denied the allegation. A number of promotional interviews were called off; protesters blocked a screening and caused it to be cancelled. Still, “An Officer and a Spy” was released to great acclaim, both from general-readership publications (including from such left-leaning journals as Le Monde and Les Inrockuptibles) and from film magazines (such as Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif). It did well at the French box office, and it was nominated for twelve Césars.

France’s minister of culture said it would be a “bad symbol” if Polanski won the César for best director. Because of the controversy, no one who worked on the film, including Polanski, attended the ceremony, in February, 2020. The venue was surrounded by protesters, who were driven back by police with tear gas. The event’s host, the actress Florence Foresti, openly mocked the movie’s prominence there. “An Officer and a Spy” won three Césars, including two for Polanski, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, but, when the director’s name was called, Foresti wasn’t onstage and didn’t return; Céline Sciamma and Adèle Haenel, of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” walked out, and Haenel called out “Shame!” and “Bravo, pedophilia” as she left. Something essential in the story of Dreyfus—defiance of French institutions and their heedless consensus—did indeed come through. ♦