The New Yorker:

This historical drama, about efforts to clear the wrongly convicted French captain Alfred Dreyfus, brings to mind the director’s own legal troubles.

By Richard Brody

The prime parallel between the movie “An Officer and a Spy” and the life of its director, Roman Polanski, is obvious but inexact. The film, whose original French title is “J’Accuse,” tells the story of the French captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was wrongly convicted of treason, in 1894. (Dreyfus was Jewish, and antisemitic prejudice played a large role in the false charge that he had sold military secrets to Germany.) And, as is widely known, in 1977, Polanski, who was working in Hollywood, pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, and, shortly before sentencing, fled to his native France, which does not extradite its citizens and where he has been based ever since. So far, so predictable. But the movie’s more substantial convergences with Polanski’s personal situation are less obvious, though far more deeply rooted in the aesthetic that has governed his directing career.

The movie, which Polanski wrote with the British novelist Robert Harris (on whose 2013 novel it’s based), starts not with Dreyfus’s arrest or conviction but with his cashiering ceremony, in the courtyard of the École Militaire, in Paris. As the insignias are cut off his uniform and his sword broken, Dreyfus (played by Louis Garrel) loudly declares his innocence, both to his brothers-in-arms and to the braying public outside the gates. The drama, for all that it depends on personal prejudice and official misconduct, is rooted in reputational damage, in the notion of honor unduly besmirched and the desire of the victim of injustice to restore his good name—and to restore his place in the Army, the institution that he loves.

Go to link