2023-08-17 07:53:45
by Giuseppina Manin
The director arrives at the finish line with a film in Venice: «The Palace» produced by the Italian
Roman Polanski will turn 90 tomorrow. But believing it is difficult, given the youthful attitude, the energy, the unbreakable humor of this director who is one of the most brilliant and singular in the history of cinema. Small in stature, lean, nervous physique, penetrating and melancholy gaze, unkempt white hair, jeans and black leather jacket, always ready to get back behind the camera. One film after another, one more surprising than the other. The latest, The Palace, crazy New Year’s Eve 2000 in a large Swiss hotel, in Gstaad, where Polanski has a home. Extremely black and provocative comedy, the protagonists of the spoiled and vicious rich people who meet there to show off all kinds of extravagance while the end of the world looms. On 2 September the preview at the Venice Film Festival. Controversy and laughter guaranteed.
Ninety years like this, proven proof that time doesn’t flow the same for everyone, should be celebrated. In his own way, without fanfare, in Paris with his wife Emmanuelle Seigner, their children Morgana and Elvis, and a small group of friends. Among these Luca Barbareschi, Italian producer of his most recent titles, from The Officer and the Spy, to the documentary Hometown, to The Palace, where he is also in the cast with Olivier Masucci, Fanny Ardant, John Cleese, Mickey Rourke. «We have loved each other for 50 years – says Barbareschi -. Roman is the nicest and kindest man I’ve ever met, as well as the amazing artist we know. In the last take of The Palace he insisted on framing a detail of my snow boot. He told me: ‘God is in the detail'”.
And among the details of the birthday there is also the day on which it falls. Friday, like August 18, 1933, when Rajmund Roman Thierry Liebing (real name of the future Roman Polanski) was born into the world in Paris from a family of Polish Jews. Three years later he has already left. To escape the growing anti-Semitism in France, his father decides to return to Krakow. Bad idea, given that shortly after the Nazis occupy Poland, Roman and him are locked up in the ghetto, his mother will die in Auschwitz, his father will survive in Mauthausen. And he, at six years old, will have to get by on his own. “A lifelong burden of memory” which he will tell in The Pianist, Palme d’Or at Cannes, three Oscars.
But in the meantime, the boy from the ghetto has to face a never-ending ordeal. Cinema comes to save him. He graduated from the Lódz School, his first film in 1962, Knife in the Water, he wrote with Jerzy Skolimowski, a screenwriter friend who now also signs The Palace. Poland is close to him. Polanski begins his wandering of déraciné. In Great Britain he makes three films that crown him director of morbid and mocking noir, from Repulsion to Cul-de-sac to Please don’t bite me on the neck. Of the latter he is also the protagonist alongside Sharon Tate. That she will become his wife and die in the massacre of Bel Air, she slaughtered eight months pregnant with four other people by Charles Manson and his followers. Roman, who is in London at the time, is devastated. Yet there are those who try to blame him by accusing him of having trafficked with the devil on the set of the sulphurous Rosemary’s Baby.
Subsequent titles, Macbeth and Chinatown , are characterized by the darkest pessimism. But what perhaps most reveals the wounded soul of the director is The Tenant on the Third Floor. The surrealist nightmare of Topor, the conspiracy implemented against a shy employee of the condominiums determined to push him to suicide, is a powerful metaphor for Polanski, so much so that he interprets it himself. Hallucinatory and hallucinatory cinema, capable of exploring dark areas with the weapon of the absurd, mixing fear and laughter. But also cinema that becomes grotesque satire, or that draws on literature, see Tess and Oliver Twist. Prolific, Polanski engages with the most disparate genres. And also in the theater.
In 1977, after a party at Jack Nicholson’s house, he was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Geimer. He spends 42 days behind bars, the judge intends to give him 50 years in prison, Roman flees to France. He will never return to the US. Registered in the Interpol red notice, in 2009 he was arrested in Zurich: he will do a year of house arrest. Although Samantha Geimer has declared that she considers the matter closed, new allegations are added: the model Valentine Monnier, at 63, claims to have been abused by him when she was 18, the actress Charlotte Lewis, at 43, reports harassment on the set of Pirates when he was sixteen.
The judicial branch is still open. And to his friend Horowitz who in Homeland asks him: «If they told you that you can relive your life as it was, would you accept?», Polanski does not hesitate: «No, I wish I was born in Hawaii».
August 17, 2023 (change August 17, 2023 | 07:53)
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