«They want to make me a monster» , he prays in the frontispiece of the last and long five-hour interview granted by Roman Polanski to the Paris-Match magazine. The idea is to clarify and even refute the latest rape accusations of former model and former actress Valentine Monnier recently appeared. The director insists, after refusing to meet even the woman who now revolves against him, that from the 60s to now, times have changed. And they have done it for the worse. «We live an extravagant time. I have the impression of attending a total change of the prevailing ideology in my youth. I have been fortunate to live in a society infinitely freer than now ... » . The press dossier of his latest film, The Officer and the Spy , speaks uneasily of "neo-feminist maccarthism" and he himself laments a time when, he says, a simple tweet is worth a conviction: "Even the witches in the Middle Ages, "he insists," were entitled to a process. "
Not far away, another veteran with classic airs, Clint Eastwood , attacks the press (against all of it and from all points of view) in Richard Jewell. Again, the director, as he did in Sully or The Sniper, uses an anonymous hero as an argument. And ecstasy. The man who avoided a massacre at the Olympic Games in Atlanta after detecting a bomb in a park went from salvador to villain in what it took to seep into the media that the FBI investigated as alleged perpetrator. The 89-year-old filmmaker is explaining himself as he is in a double sense. Like his colleague (and like everyone else), he is irritated that a man was convicted and then found innocent without trial or evidence or presumption of innocence. This time the person responsible is not Twitter, but as if it were: the intention and the damage are identical. A step further, in a confusing attempt to perhaps not extend the accusation to all the media, points out as responsible for everything a woman-journalist who acted as time, the common place and, why not, the hetero-patriarchy have Decided whores behave. The information, imagine Eastwood and his screenwriter Billy Ray rendered to the saddest of the cliches , was obtained in exchange for sex. Nothing points in that direction in reality (since everything, again, is based on events that happened), but, as it happens in the movie curiously, the mess is left.
In their own way, both coincide in their last works, that chance (or destiny) tries to bring together at the same time, the same restlessness, the same anger, identical nostalgia imposed by those times so wrong and, in judgment of the two, so presumably free. Polanski laments an attempt to boycott (and lynch) and even more violently rises against all those who have accused him of placing himself at the height of Alfred Dreyfus. Of that, indeed, goes The officer and the spy . The officer who was unjustly accused and without evidence of treason and who motivated the famous article I accuse of Zola, in reality, as time has shown, was but the most obvious evidence of a lacerating anti-Semitism in the French society of the time. And following, it could be added. Eastwood, on the other hand, complains that the same zeal shown by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in defending the reporter who died in 2001 of the cruelty of his film is not equivalent to at least, or so publicized, the which he exhibited then (and now also) when he had to apologize to Jewell and comply with the correct rectification.
Be that as it may, the truth is that, despite even themselves, both Polanski and Eastwood make their latest works authentic statements of principles against precisely the first principles. Polanski offers one of his most refined and orthodox works, pure goldsmithing, when reconstructing each of the accidents of a case that moved the foundations of an entire society and that, in its own way, announced the even greater disaster that would hardly come A few decades later. When the French director born in Poland is asked about the MeToo and what has been generically called release of the word, he revolts against the interviewer with a detailed description of precisely the knot of the officer and the spy . «I cannot adhere to a movement that aims to cut heads for the sake of some. It is said that it is the price to pay for a just cause, but that contradicts the foundations of our civilization in matters of justice ... And that is an essential argument in my film ».
Eastwood, likewise, gets Richard Jewell one of his best achievements in recent times. A distance from the sickly obsession with adrenaline and the homeland of Chris Kyle in The Sniper and far from the certainty of his trade near the sanctity of the airplane pilot in Sully , the hero now appears in an undefined, murky terrain, comical and, if you like, as unstable as the thugs outside the law of Mystic river . The film interrogates the viewer from the provocation and for this he does not hesitate to pull the perfect manual, with forgiveness, cipotudo.
It is not risky to venture that both one and the other are seen and represented in the skin of their protagonists and, like them, they feel victims by force misunderstood from a time that instead of recognizing their career and successes, condemns them . «If I am judged by my films, one could say that I am a feminist. Chinatown, Tess, Death and the Maiden, The Venus of the Skins ... All of them are tributes to women, ”confesses Polanski and does so with the same rage that his character, Dreyfus, claims patriot beyond simple patriotism . By accepting a sentence that he knows is unfair, he acknowledges, before himself and others, French over any other condition, belief or creed. He (Polanski), who had to see his mother die in Auschwitz; he, who saw how the freedom he claims from his youth was the breeding ground for the murder of his wife Sharon Tate; he, who attended how Weinstein himself snatched away Oscar for best film by The Pianist ... He is now expelled from the Hollywood Academy (2018) ("More than an outcast consider me a leper") and recently suspended in the society of authors, filmmakers and producers (Arp).
Jewell, like Dreyfus, attends submissively to every interrogation that condemns him. He responds where his lawyer advises him to silence and submissively accepts each of the pitfalls that agents tend to rebel against the obvious contradictions of a system that, despite everything and against everything, is his. Eastwood behaves similarly. His rigorously classic cinema makes lesbian jokes (it happened in Mula ) with a liberality more typical of the Pleistocene. And, in the same way, he proposes a complete disqualification of the lie spread online before the invention of social networks, while allowing the most blushing topics attached to women to acquire the consistency of lies a thousand times repeated . Provocation or clairvoyance?
Polanski says they want to make him a monster. Warning that Eastwood would not hesitate to make his own. And in the polysemy of the noun itself that is equally valid for horror than for excellence, there is the constancy of two monsters that devour and are devoured by their own monstrosity.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- cinema
- culture
The final interview Pedro Vallín: "If they lynch you, they call you asshole on Twitter ... it's not for much"
CineMuere actor Danny Aiello, star of 'Do what you owe', at age 86
Story of a marriageNoah Baumbach: "A divorce leaves the same phantom pain as an amputated arm"