Could the controversial director be drawing personal parallels with this solid account of the Dreyfus affair, about a falsely accused French-Jewish army captain?
Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish captain in the French general staff, a man of spotless reputation and character accused of selling military secrets to the Germans. Convicted on duff evidence, he was exiled to flyblown Devil’s Island off the South American coast, railroaded and martyred, like Jesus, or Peter, or possibly Roman Polanski, who has spotted certain parallels between his situation and that of Dreyfus and has helpfully made a movie that may encourage us to do likewise.
I’ll leave it to finer legal minds than mine to locate possible holes in Polanski’s thesis, suffice to say that Dreyfus was never found guilty of the statutory rape of a minor. But the film itself is handsome and involving – a dogged procedural that exposes the institutionalised antisemitism of 1890s France and builds to the publication of Emile Zola’s J’accuse, an open letter to the president that lifted the lid on the whole sorry affair.
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