Review of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008) by Ross L — 23 Feb 2009

A superb documentary that is rarely, if ever, objective about its subject. With no over-arching narration, remembrances of talking heads are relied upon for exposition and observation, and above all for opinion.

The film sometimes takes on the child-rape charges at the centre of the Polanski controversy head-on, but employs a tone of circumstantial dismissal, for the most part. Polanski himself comes across as excessively casual, careless even.

Attempts are quite obviously made to connect the tragedies and follies of his life with his art, but I think his films are best seen as artful tangents from what he's lived through, escapes into related but obscured aesthetic fantasy.

Whether one feels that his 30-year exile from his adopted country is punishment enough for his crimes (or felonies, or moral failures, or whatever you choose to call them), it's hard to argue with the film's explication of the bizarre miscarriage of justice that was his legal proceedings.

It's truly an odd sequence of legal events, and the film embraces the procedural strangeness of it, perhaps as an escape from the thornier questions that lay behind it. Still, it's an exceedingly well-made film that asks the right questions, though not always with the right degree of amplification, it should be said.

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