“An Officer and a Spy” manages the rare distinction of being both dull and controversial
THE MOST controversial film in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival is “J’Accuse” or “An Officer and a Spy”, not because of its subject or its style, but because it is directed by Roman Polanski. After Mr Polanski pleaded guilty to “unlawful intercourse with a minor” in America in 1977 he absconded from the country, but he was quickly forgiven by Hollywood. In 2003 he won an Oscar for directing “The Pianist”—not that he could collect his trophy in Los Angeles without risking arrest.
Adapted from Robert Harris’s novel, and co-written by Mr Harris and Mr Polanski, the film dramatises the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish major in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongly convicted of selling secrets to Germany. Mr Polanski has told reporters that he knows a thing or two about such unjust anti-Semitic persecution himself, thus implying that “An Officer and a Spy” is, on one level, his angry response to his drop in stature.
At this stage, there are brief glimpses of what might have been: a gripping detective yarn, with almost as many magnifying glasses and bowlers hats as a Sherlock Holmes adventure. Later, there are some bursts of action when Emile Zola’s pro-Dreyfus editorial results in his books being tossed on a bonfire, and when Picquart—whose own anti-Semitism, unlike his fellow officers', does not obstruct his devotion to the truth—fights a duel and dodges an assassin’s bullets.
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