And so when I heard that Roman Polanski was directing a film about it, my heart sank.
Roman Polanski, is, of course, a renowned director, winner of three Academy Awards and responsible for classic films including Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. He was also the husband of Sharon Tate, the Hollywood actress notoriously murdered by the Manson family.
In 1977, Polanski was arrested and charged with drugging and raping a 13 year old girl. He would go on to plead guilty of the lesser offence of “unlawful sex with a minor”. However, after hearing that a proposed plea deal was going to be rejected by a judge and that he would be jailed, the director fled to Europe, where he has lived ever since.
When I heard that Polanski, who is Jewish, was directing the film (based on the 2013 novel by Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy) I suspected he had chosen to direct it for a very simple reason. And this week my suspicions were confirmed. In an interview given this week before the movie’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the director drew a direct comparison between his situation and that of Alfred Dreyfus.
“I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done”, the director said.
“Most of the people who harass me do not know me and know nothing about the case.”
Well, we know enough about Polanski’s case to know that any comparison of the two is, quite frankly, a grotesque insult to the memory of Alfred Dreyfus. The French army officer was the victim of an ossified military which was riddled with antisemites. He was falsely convicted of treason committed, it transpired, by another. Even when almost the whole of France was against him, he always maintained his innocence, despite being incarcerated for years in dreadful conditions on Devil’s Island, a penal colony in French Guiana.
Polanski, by contrast, was a powerful 44 year old film director, with significant prestige in Hollywood, when he was arrested. His treatment was not exactly Dreyfusesque – 6 weeks of psychiatric evaluation, with his legal team ironing out a plea bargain which would downgrade the charges he was facing, including rape, to admitting one charge of unlawful sex with a minor, after which he would walk free. Except that upon hearing that the judge (himself Jewish) apparently had decided to jail him instead, he flew off. Two years later, he would win a second Academy Award for Best Director (he would win a third in 2002) as well as numerous other awards and plaudits over the decades. It was only last year, more than 40 years after he pled guilty in his statutory rape case, that the Academy would expel him, at the height of the #MeToo movement.
The Dreyfus affair is of great importance not just to European Jewish history, but Jewish history as a whole. It made it clear to at least some westernised Jews that even supposedly enlightened countries could turn on Jews with a vengeance – and it was subsequently seen as a harbinger of the terrible events to come. It was also said to have been a major factor in persuading Theodor Herzl, a Jewish journalist present at the military degradation ceremony of Dreyfus, of the importance of Zionism and the need for Jews to regain a country of their own.
For Polanski to twist this into some sort of vile allegory about his own case should be regarded as an unconscionable insult to Jews everywhere.
The movie goes on general release at the end of the month. I would urge Jews not to go and see it at the cinema. I would urge Jewish institutions not to organise screenings of it. And I would urge Jewish publications, including this one, not to review it.
To honour this movie would be to indelibly attach the name and case of Polanski to that of Alfred Dreyfus. The Jewish soldier suffered enough in life. He should not have to bear this indignity in death.
