Polanski gets a fair trial in Cannes


Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
Sympathy for the devil? Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

Roman Polanski is such a mercurial and evasive creature that we will surely never hear the true story behind his 1977 rape charge and subsequent flight from the US. But Marina Zenovich's documentary, Wanted and Desired, up-ended a few of my own assumptions. The film screened at Cannes yesterday and offers a bleak view of the legal machinations behind the case. Both prosecutor and defender were of the same opinion that the judge (if not the law itself) was an ass.

It's not that Zenovich's film attempts to whitewash its subject. Polanski has never denied having sex with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey and even cheerfully admits he was fully aware of her age at the time. And despite his friends and colleagues lining up to explain what a "charismatic" fellow he is, he remains as defiantly dislikeable as ever. For much of the film Polanski comes across as a preening, insecure smart-aleck. He mistakes amorality for abandon and leaves a trail of mess in his wake.

No, it is simply that the ensuing legal circus risks making him look halfway honourable by comparison. Some might call it karma. Just as it was Gailey's unhappy fate to run up against Roman Polanski in excitable Austin Powers mode, so it was Polanski's unhappy fate to later run up against Judge Rittenband. A star-struck, skirt-chasing buffoon, Rittenband regarded the case as his big moment in the limelight and proceeded to direct its twists and turns like some puffed-up Hollywood martinet. All the really important stuff - the victim, the accused, the search for justice - played a distant second fiddle to the Rittenband ego.

Zenovich also nails the media's handling of the case, and its depiction of the defendant as some "malignant, twisted dwarf"; the foreign interloper with a taste for young American flesh. One friend points out that the press traditionally views Polanski as "a man of darkness" and has always confused the man with his movies. He made The Tenant so must therefore be a transvestite. He made Chinatown and is therefore a paedophile. He made Rosemary's Baby and is thus in league with Satan. When Sharon Tate was murdered by supporters of Charles Manson, the media insisted that he must be at least tangentially responsible.

Wanted and Desired goes some way towards setting the record straight. It interviews most of the people involved in the case, including Gailey herself (who publicly forgave Polanski in 1997). Along the way it paints a portrait of a fascinating, brilliant, untrustworthy man. Polanski was seduced by California and it ate him up. He did wrong and was wronged. That doesn't make him the victim here but it at least merits some sympathy.