Roman Polanski’s simplistic portrayal of the historic Dreyfus trial makes An Officer and a Spy a rather lifeless affair.
France
3*
Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Robert Harris
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman
Running time: 130 minutes
Original title: J’accuse
Non-Jews often prefer to think of antisemitism as something that began and immediately peaked under the Nazis. That is a simplification of history that would border on baloney if it wasn’t so tragically uninformed. While history offers countless counterexamples, the two most notorious trials involving innocent Jews took place within just five years of each other: Leopold Hilsner (1899/1900), accused and convicted of two murders, and Alfred Dreyfus (1894), twice convicted of treason. In both cases, a man’s alleged culpability was supported by a passionate wave of antisemites frothing at the mouth for a conviction rather than actual facts. The story of Hilsner, a native Czech in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sadly remains untold on the big screen. Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy recounts the fallout of Dreyfus’s trial and, ultimately, his quasi-exoneration.
We meet Dreyfus on the worst day of his life. On 5 January 1895, he is stripped of his rank in front of his fellow soldiers. It amounts to a public humiliation ceremony. Born and raised in France, he had joined the military as a young man. Towards the end of the 19th century, he registered at the prestigious War College, where he was an outstanding student. Then came the accusations that he had shared state secrets with the German Empire. Handwritten notes were produced as evidence, and he was found guilty. His sentence was lifelong solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, offshore from French Guiana, where even the guards were not allowed to speak to him.
One of his former teachers at the War College, Georges Picquart, gets a promotion to lead the “Statistical Section”, which is really the counter-espionage service. This section had been responsible for collecting (rather, creating) the damning evidence that established Dreyfus’s guilt during the trial. Full of purpose and moral clarity, Picquart seeks to shake up the dusty bureaucracy immediately. When he learns that one of his officers regularly receives intelligence from the German Embassy passed on by the cleaning lady, he decides to do the pick-up himself, despite having no intelligence-gathering experience whatsoever. That night’s pick-up produces incriminating snippets of paper that quickly lead him to suspect a French officer of being a spy for the Germans. And it isn’t long before the officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, is revealed to be the real culprit in the affair that convicted Dreyfus.
Under Polanski’s direction, evidence simply falls into Picquart’s hands on countless occasions. Whatever avenue he pursues is always the right one and leads him on a straight path to crucial evidence that proves his intuition correct. It is to be expected that a screenplay based on real events will simplify life’s messiness for the viewer. But the facile jumping from one point to the next here cannot be exciting to the viewer because it all feels totally contrived. In addition, the army’s top brass are antisemitic across the board, and none of them appears to harbour any doubt whatsoever about the cover-ups and forgeries that sent Dreyfus to prison. Except for Picquart, no one wants to track down the real criminal, which is mind-blowing and not particularly convincing.
It becomes clear that the army really targeted Dreyfus for the crime of, in today’s parlance, “breathing while Jewish”. The xenophobia among the powerful is evident and unabating. In an early scene, Picquart’s predecessor, Lt. Col. Sandherr, is shown bedridden with syphilis, whining about how outsiders have invaded the motherland. “When I see so many foreigners around me, I notice the degeneration of moral and artistic values. I realise that I no longer recognise France. [Please protect] what’s left of the country!” he pleads with Picquart. But this moment, which finds a strong echo in the current resurgence of nationalism, is left undeveloped. Polanski also fails to detail how the Dreyfus affair exacerbated feelings of Christian Gallic pride among the general population.
But Picquart goes it alone, persevering despite his inherent antisemitism, driven by a desire for justice. He carries out his investigation without the help of anyone else in his intelligence office. No amount of pushback from the generals above him can douse his passion for the truth, and no one intimidates him. These might be admirable characteristics in a man, but we do not see him emotionally tested. Everything always works out. By the time all sense of justice seems lost, he suddenly meets not only Deputy (and future Prime Minister) Georges Clemenceau but also revered novelist of the working class, Émile Zola. Within days, Zola’s famous newspaper article, “J’accuse!”, lays into every powerful individual involved in the Dreyfus conspiracy. And thus begins the final legal brawl.
But despite France being a colonial power, the scenes in court, openly biased in favour of the military, paint the country as little more than a banana republic. What should be the most intense part of the film is staged and edited together as a comedy.
Jean Dujardin stars as Picquart, but despite his amiable demeanour, the character doesn’t undergo any change – a point strikingly made in the film’s final scene. An unrecognisable Louis Garrel plays Dreyfus, whose lack of presence in the film makes him a peripheral character in his own story. But in the scenes where he does appear, he responds to the constant humiliation with brave stoicism that sometimes cracks under the pressure of boiling anger. In other words, like a real human being.
It is well established that in 1977, a 43-year-old Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, later identified as Samantha Gailey. He admitted to this in court. So, while he has said explicitly that he understands Dreyfus’s persecution, their cases are in no way the same. Dreyfus was innocent and was framed because he was Jewish. Polanski was and is still guilty because he committed a criminal act. In this regard, his being Jewish is about as relevant as his being 5’5″. If the director really wanted to make a film about his alleged innocence (despite pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor), let him stage a re-enactment of his starring role in the vile 1977 rape.
But there is no connective tissue whatsoever between An Officer and a Spy and Polanski. The film isn’t good or bad because of his personal life. It is just mediocre because he couldn’t be bothered to imbue it with the authentic messiness of life.