Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy

France just rewarded the mass murderers guilty of the 10/7 atrocities by officially recognizing the territory governed by the responsible terrorist organization. That should be shocking, but antisemitism is baked into French history. Over a century later, French antisemites are still trying to frame Alfred Dreyfus for treason. Sadly, the case remains timely, but Roman Polanski might be a flawed candidate to bring his story to the big screen (since he is a literally a fugitive from justice). Nevertheless, he is the filmmaker who collaborated with author Robert Harris, to adapt his fact-based novel. The result happens to be Polanski’s best film in years, which deserves consideration regardless of your judgement of the director. “Long awaited” by some, An Officer and a Spy (a.k.a. J’accuse), finally opens (after six years) this Friday in New York at Film Forum.

The film starts with the infamous “degrading” of Captain Dreyfus after his treason conviction, including the breaking of his saber. Col. Marie-Georges Picquart played a small, behind-the-scenes part in his conviction, which troubles him not, since he assumes Dreyfus is guilty. Shortly thereafter, he is appointed to lead the contemporary equivalent of military intelligence. In this new position, he soon learns the irregularities in the Dreyfus case were deliberately and dubiously irregular.

While investigating another potential traitor, Maj. Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, Dreyfus uncovers evidence that suggests his new suspect was in fact guilty of the crimes for which Dreyfus was convicted. However, his superiors in the army and the War Department close ranks, preferring a traitor like Esterhazy to remain free rather than admit Dreyfus’s innocence. Picquart refuses to lie, but he always follows orders, so the generals assign him to a whirlwind of dangerous foreign postings. Nevertheless, during a rare homecoming, Picquart consulted with Dreyfus’s defenders, including Emile Zola, who pens the explosive “J’Accuse” indictment.

At this point, French society cleaves in half, while both Picquart and Zola face criminal charges. In some ways, An Officer and a Spy plays like a late 19^th Century variant on paranoid 1970s political corruption thrillers, which makes sense, because that was largely Harris’s concept for the source novel. Indeed, he had plenty of historical material to work with, including assassination attempts and duels. Yet, it also a masterful mood piece, wherein Polanski captures the stuffy social restraint and suffocating hypocrisy of fin de siècle France.

Dreyfus himself only appears intermittently, mostly at the beginning and the end. Nevertheless, Louis Garrel’s performance is quite extraordinary. Harris and Polanski mostly concern themselves with Picquart’s campaign to expose the unjust conspiracy instead of the man who was their target, sort of like Kevin Costner in JFK, except the events of this film really did happen.

Jean Dujardin also disappears into the role of cerebral Picquart. (At times, he looks more like Gilles Lellouche.) Regardless, it is an unusually anti-heroic performance, despite Picquart’s typically heroic activities, like chasing assassins and clearing the name of an innocent man. Dujardin’s portrayal of the Colonel is deliberately hard to embrace (especially given his early anti-Jewish prejudice), but he conveys his intelligence and integrity, while staying consistent with the prevailing attitudes of his time.

Quentin Dupieux’s Deerskin

“Clothes make the man,” Mark Twain told us. In this case, they make a French loser obsessive and delusional. Georges turns outlaw after donning a vintage Davy Crockett-style jacket. Indeed, he is so taken with it, he wants it to be the only jacket in the world, which is fine by the jacket in French provocateur Quentin Dupieux’s Deerskin, which opens virtually tomorrow.

Apparently, Georges has gotten the boot from his wife, but he rebounds with the jacket. Unwisely, he blows all his cash on it, before he discovers his wife froze their joint account. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The deerskin fringe just called to him. Fortunately, the seller threw in an old digital video camera that will allow him to pose (dubiously) as a filmmaker while hiding out in a provincial tourist town, during the off-season.

Despite his cluelessness, Georges recruits Denise, the local bartender and an aspiring film editor, for his film project. She can tell he is an amateur, but his supposedly experimental footage appeals to her hipster sensibility—especially when he starts filming the murders his jacket tells him to commit.

It is rather baffling how a dreary misfire like Deerskin could be picked up for distribution when Dupieux’s drolly subversive Keep an Eye Out has yet to get a real American release. Frankly, the best things about Deerskin are composer Janko Nilovic’s Bernard Hermann-esque musical cues. Unfortunately, the playfulness of Dupieux’s past films (especially Wrong, Reality, and Keep an Eye Out) is largely missing this time around. Instead, Dupieux belabors tired themes of “toxic masculinity.” If you don’t know what that term means, it is the kind of swagger the G.I.’s had when they liberated Europe from fascism. Obviously, they look askance at that kind of “toxic” thing in France.

The Connection: Marseilles in the 1970s

In the dark days of 1970s, way before Giuliani, three men essentially waged a two-front war on the so-called French Connection. Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso (a.k.a. Popeye Doyle and Buddy Russo) battled the drug ring in New York, while Magistrate Pierre Michel crusaded against them in Marseilles. Forty-some years after William Friedkin’s The French Connection told the New York cops’ story Michel finally gets his own big screen treatment in Cédric Jimenez’s The Connection (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

While a Magistrate (that peculiarly French office of investigating judge) in the juvenile crime division, Michel witnessed the devastating consequences of the drug trade first-hand. When promoted to felony narcotics, his zeal and integrity surprised a lot of people, particularly honest coppers like Aimé-Blanc. Michel makes no secret of his hope to dethrone Gaetan “Tany” Zampa, the presumably untouchable boss of the Connection’s Marseilles operation. Lacking proof against Zampa, Michel tries to whittle away at his organization, declaring open war on all his underlings.

Naturally, as Michel’s war against Zampa escalates, things get rather ugly. Michel finds his plans constantly undermined by corruption in the Marseilles police department and mayor’s office. However, Zampa also starts to feel the heat from former associates-turned-rivals, who try to move in on the weakened kingpin’s action. The most erratic of these upstarts will be the aptly named “Crazy Horse,” who will cause no end of headaches for Michel as well.

For fans of gangster movies, The Connection is like Christmas and your birthday all rolled together. It is obsessively detailed and compulsively dot-connecting. Art director Patrick Schmitt’s period décor is spot on, but the hedonistic Marseilles backdrop gives the film a vibe more closely akin to Boogie Night than Friedkin’s grungy street-level Oscar winner.

Not just a strong likeness of Michel, Jean Dujardin has the right over-sized presence for the honest Magistrate as well. As seen in The Artist and the OSS 117 franchise, Dujardin can play it scrupulously earnest and square, in a way that is completely genuine and not the least bit ironic. Despite his bouts of righteous indignation and the ultimately tragic dimensions of the tale, there is something Capra-esque about Michel that he successfully personifies. Likewise, Gilles Lellouche (one of the best in the business) expresses the ferocity concealed beneath Zampa’s ice cold façade. Jimenez and Audrey Diwan’s screenplay never valorizes the gangster, per se, but it unmistakably implies those who succeeded him would be even worse.

Decades after the fact, The Connection still feels rather bold for its willingness to name names. It makes it explicitly clear to viewers the same Marseilles that was delivering votes for Mitterrand also protected and abetted the notorious international drug syndicate. Indeed, Gaston Deferre, the Mayor of Marseilles, who would serve as Mitterrand’s Interior Minister (because obviously his city was so squeaky clean), plays a critical but maddeningly ambiguous role in the film.

An unusually ambitious sophomore film, The Connection is sprawling in scope but profoundly jaded in its attitude, exactly like some of the best cinema from the era it depicts. Highly recommended, it opens this Friday (5/15) in New York, at the Landmark Sunshine.

Tribeca ’13: Mobius

In Russia, today’s captain of industry is tomorrow’s rogue oligarch.  Even sponsoring the next head of the FSB is not enough to protect one tycoon.  Instead, it makes him a liability.  An agent specializing in sensitive assignments will target the shadowy money man through an attractive employee, leading to all sorts of complications in Eric Rochant’s Möbius (trailer here), which screens at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Gregory Lioubov commands an FSB team pretending to be a Monaco police task force, attempting to turn Alice Redmund, a brilliant trader for with a scandalous past.  Redmund works for Ivan Rostovski’s multi-national firm, but she also secretly reports to an American handler.  Realizing the Russians are putting a play on Rostovski, the CIA instructs Redmund to play along with the task force she still assumes are local cops. 

When Lioubov accidentally picks up Redmund to protect his cover[s], it compromises them both.  Suddenly, Redmund is hiding their burgeoning affair from the jealous Rostovski while Moïse, as Lioubov calls himself, scrambles to keep his incompetent subordinates in the dark.  Then things really get tricky.

Möbius is pretty steamy stuff by espionage movie standards.  These spies definitely come in out of the cold.  As Lioubov (or whoever) and Redmund, co-leads Jean Dujardin and Cécile de France have real chemistry and are not afraid to go all in.  However, the rest of the cloak-and-daggering is not bad either.  While there seems to be a bit of an anti-American bias, at least it is rather muddled.  The FSB on the other hand is clearly portrayed as a nest of vipers indistinguishable from its previous incarnation as the dreaded KGB.

In a change-up from his Oscar winning turn in The Artist, Dujardin brings a dark, brooding physicality to Lioubov.  De France is a respectable femme fatale-anti-heroine, but Tim Roth nearly steals the show as the erratic British educated Rostovski.

Rochant nicely juggles all the feints and double-crosses as the film alternates between romanticism and cynicism.  Cinematographer Pierre Novion gives it all a stylish noir polish that should satisfy genre fans.  Recommended for patrons of French cinema and cerebral spy thrillers, Möbius screens again tomorrow (4/27) and Sunday as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

A Silent Contender: The Artist

Talking pictures were a truly Schumpeterian phenomenon for Hollywood. As any film lover knows from Singin’ in the Rain, some silent movie stars could weather the creative destruction wrought by the transition to sound, whereas some could not. Matinee idol George Valentin was one of those who could not “talk.” Fittingly, his story is a told silently (or nearly so) in The Artist (trailer here), Michel Hazanavicius’s glorious black-and-white homage to the golden age of Hollywood, which opens this Friday in New York.

It is 1927. George Valentin is at the height of his popularity as a Douglas Fairbanks style swashbuckler. He has just fought the red menace as an agent of free Georgia in The Russian Affair. However, studio mogul Al Zimmer has something disturbing to show him: synchronized sound. Dismissing the future, Valentin returns to work on his next picture, which will be only remembered as the brief screen debut of future superstar Peppy Miller. Obviously thrilled to have any screen time, Miller is particularly excited to share a scene with her favorite star, George Valentin.

When talkies become the standard, Miller’s career takes off like a rocket with frothy romantic comedies. Meanwhile, Valentin’s attempt to finance his own silent comeback vehicle proves disastrous. Yet, Miller’s feelings for yesterday’s leading man remain unchanged.

Hazanavicius consciously draws from dozens of classic films (both pre- and post-Jazz Singer), as well as numerous real larger-than-life Hollywood figures. What follows incorporates elements of A Star is Born, Sunset Boulevard, and Greta Garbo’s relationship with John Gilbert. (Sadly, many modern movie-goers will miss the allusions, but perhaps the notion of a film without diegetic sound might be a brand new novelty item for them.)

As the product of many artists’ work, the film is a visual splendor, beginning with Guillaume Schiffman’s lush and moody black-and-white cinematography (shot in color, but printed in fabulous shades of gray, as per today’s standard practice), which makes the elegant sets and costumes softly glow like a Cecil Beaton portrait. Still, it is the depth of Hazanavicius’s screenplay that really distinguishes The Artist.

Not merely a series of winks at TCM watchers, the film is quite a touching love story, completely free of irony. On the two occasions it breaks format, sound is used in creative ways that cleverly advance the film. Periodically, Hazanavicius also appears to indulge in a witty in-joke, yet in each case, their unexpected dramatic logic catches us by surprise. Likewise, while his inter-titles have a simplicity befitting the period, they convey a surprising richness of meaning.

Familiar to American audiences from Hazanavicius’s French OSS 117 spy spoofs, Jean Dujardin gives another very physical performance here, but the complexity and pathos of his Valentin is in a whole different league. Indeed, it is a tricky proposition to play a mugging actor without ever mugging for the camera, yet he is never overly broad or over the top, keeping the faded movie star acutely human throughout. He also develops some endearing romantic chemistry with Bérénice Bejo as Miller.

Frankly, the Argentine-French Bejo is about the only person working in film today who can approximate the glamorous look of Hollywood in its heyday (yes, this definitely includes Michelle Williams). Exquisite and vulnerable, she deserves a bit of award attention along with Dujardin, the best actor winner at this year’s Cannes. In contrast, the American supporting cast does not have much to do, but John Goodman’s cigar-chomping shtick works perfectly for Zimmer, even without sound.

After winning over all but the most jaded critics at this year’s New York Film Festival, The Artist has emerged as a major Oscar contender. Frankly, this is the film for the Weinsteins to put their chips on, not the Marilyn story or Madonna’s vanity project. It is a beautifully rendered valentine to movie-making, featuring two wildly charismatic romantic leads. Highly recommended, The Artist opens this Friday (11/25) in New York at the Paris Theater and Angelika Film Center.