This iconic director Roman Polanski's latest work took home a grand slam in Venice (including the prestigious Gold Lion), but after the success there, it has stormed around his historic portrait of the unjustly spy-charged officer Alfred Dreyfus. Not least at the Paris premiere, which was stopped by protesters who did not think the rape-accused director's film should be shown.

The old tired discussion about whether one can / should separate the work from the artist has received a whole tankload of new fuel in these meto-times, when accusations of abuse cause careers to stall or completely crash land.

But Polanski vomits , despite having been basically a chased man since he fled the United States after the rape charge in the US in 1978. Yes, longer than that, if you count in his childhood with distress and barely escaped the Nazis in Poland , and not least that his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson's followers.

No wonder then, that his films were often about individuals exposed to mental and / or real attacks from their surroundings. As in the early films, which came to define him as a filmmaker, the still potent classics Repulsion, Rosemary's baby and Chinatown. But even much later, as in the return to the heavy drama of the Pianist from 2002 where he goes back to the source of pain, Nazi Poland where a Jewish musician struggles for his survival in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.

But anti-Semitism was not born in the 1930s, Polanski reminds us in An officer and spy; it has ancient roots and flourished unrestrained even in the turn of the last century France, where Jewish officer Dreyfus is accused and convicted of treason, and sent to the devil's son. The film begins with the degradation itself, which takes place under studied disgraceful forms in front of a jubilant large audience in a square in Paris.
After that, a fight is awaiting the establishment that we know will come, in particular led by Colonel Piquart (Jean Dujardin from The Artist) and, as you know, supported by contemporary writer Emil Zola and his classic text J'Acusse.

The road to success may not be gas-hugging, towards the end even slightly repetitive, but nevertheless exciting and extremely well-made. A neat, rigorous and what appears to be a compelling story about the case itself, but which also paints a compelling picture of society that enabled the abuse of justice. In addition, with a convincing act, not least from the protagonist Louis Garrel, who goes so far into his character that one wonders if he will ever come out again.

An officer and spy have been reduced to being a product of a paranoid brain and themselves; a tearful (and very costly) defense figure signed by a director who considers himself as unfairly accused and unjustly persecuted as Dreyfus.
It may be, it is no coincidence that Polanski, just in meto-times, chose to make a film about one of the most famous judicial murders in world history.
The old master director may be a pig, but still An officer and spy is a meticulous craft, impressive for its breadth and detail, in image and historical thought.