Paris (AFP)
Roman Polanski, who received the César award for best director for "J'accuse" on Friday, is a multi-award-winning filmmaker with an anti-conformist work, many of whom have become a symbol of unpunished sexual assault despite being the subject of several charges. rape.
Director, actor, screenwriter and producer, he has built in twenty feature films an often disturbing, tormented and pessimistic work, marked by themes such as confinement, perversion and persecution, and a great technical mastery.
A career punctuated by outstanding films, such as "Repulsion", "Rosemary's Baby", "Tess", "Le Pianiste" or "The Ghost Writer".
Rewarded around the world, he won the Grand Jury Prize in Venice in 2019 for "J'accuse", the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2002 and the Oscar for best director in 2003 for "Le Pianiste", two times the César for best film for "Tess" and "The Pianist", and five times for best director.
But the 86-year-old Franco-Polish filmmaker is also a man targeted by several rape accusations - 12 according to feminists - whom he refutes.
Always prosecuted by the American justice system for illegal sex with a minor in 1977, he has been the target since November of a new accusation, by the French photographer Valentine Monnier, who says that he was beaten and raped by him in Gstaadt (Switzerland) in 1975, at the age of 18.
It has become for feminists and part of public opinion an "exemplary case" of unpunished sexual abuse, to use the expression of French actress Adèle Haenel.
- "dividing line" -
Born on August 18, 1933 in Polish Polish parents who returned to Poland when he was only three years old, Roman Polanski was marked by his childhood in the Krakow ghetto.
He barely avoided deportation, unlike his parents and his half-sister. Her pregnant mother will not return from Auschwitz. It was later entrusted to a peasant family until the end of the war.
He will draw from this experience his most personal film, "The Pianist", where Adrien Brody camps a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. "I sometimes have the impression, he will say, that all I did before was a kind of repetition of the + Pianist +".
A graduate of the Lodz Film Institute (Poland) in 1959, the young Roman Polanski began his career in 1962 with a psychological thriller, "The Knife in the water", frowned upon in his country but which opened the doors to him. West.
The success in 1965 of "Repulsion", with Catherine Deneuve as an insane murderer, was her passport to Hollywood.
The American adventure lasts a decade, traversed by happinesses - success, marriage with the actress Sharon Tate met on the turning of "Ball of the Vampires" - and of nightmares.
On August 9, 1969, while in London, his wife, eight months pregnant, was found murdered in Los Angeles with four of his friends by satanist disciples of Charles Manson.
Eight years later, at 43, he is arrested, accused of drugging and raping the day before a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Geimer, during a photo session in the villa of Jack Nicholson.
The filmmaker, who denies rape but pleads guilty to "illegal sexual intercourse" with a minor, spends a month and a half in prison. Once out, fearing a more severe punishment, he fled from the United States in early 1978 to France.
- "green fruit" -
Roman Polanski will later tell a French journalist his attraction for "green fruits": "I like very young girls, first of all because they are more beautiful, it is obvious, but above all because they satisfy my desire for purity and romance. "
Under an arrest warrant, he was caught up in the Samantha Geimer affair several times, notably in 2009, when he was arrested in Switzerland and placed under house arrest for eight months. Switzerland ultimately refuses to extradite him.
Naturalized French since 1976, the filmmaker, married since 1989 with actress Emmanuelle Seigner, with whom he has two children, has continued his career there since the late 1970s.
He returned to the fore in the early 2000s with "The Pianist", then in 2010 with the thriller "The Ghost Writer", awarded with the Silver Bear in Berlin and the César for best director. In 2014, he received this César for "The Venus with the fur".
But in 2017, he had to give up presiding over the Cesar ceremony under pressure from feminists, who were also outraged by a retrospective dedicated to him at the Cinémathèque.
"J'accuse", on the Dreyfus Affair, sets fire to the powder. The film experienced an eventful release in France in November, before a new wave of protest linked to the announcement at the end of January of its 12 nominations for the Césars.
After calls to boycott the film, feminists protested in front of the Salle Pleyel on Friday, the site of the Cesar ceremony. The filmmaker has given up attending.
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