LE MONDE'S OPINION – WHY NOT?

Anything directly or indirectly related to Roman Polanski, the world-renowned filmmaker, is a delicate matter to handle. Having raped a teenage girl in 1977, he fled the US, where the judge in charge of his case had reneged on his own decision after the director had served his sentence. In the end, he was considered – by his victim first and foremost – to be in the clear of the charges brought against him. Other accusations of sexual violence recently brought against him, relating to events dating back half a century, have made him a symbol of sexual predatory behavior for the past decade, to the point where it has now become complicated for him to continue his work, despite the success enjoyed in 2019 by his previous film, An Officer and a Spy.

The Palace was nonetheless produced in Italy by Luca Barbareschi and selected for the 2023 Venice Film Festival. But no French distributor stepped forward, no doubt both because the film was generally panned there and because the #MeToo movement has grown considerably stronger in France in the meantime. Sébastien Tiveyrat, founder in 2003 of Swashbuckler Films, a company dedicated to repertory cinema, and distributor, of over 200 gems of Hollywood heritage, surprisingly rose to the occasion.

To all appearances, Tiveyrat's reason for taking on the distribution of a contemporary film is purely auteurist. A lifelong admirer of Polanski, scandalized by the idea that his film could not be seen in France, he bought The Palace unseen and explained his decision to Le Monde: "I don't have to comment on the Polanski affair. I feel that there is currently a cabal underway against the artist. A certain mixture of hypocrisy and discrimination. We're not far from Fury [1936] by [Fritz] Lang, or The Hanging Tree [1959] by [Delmer] Daves. In fact, the film was released everywhere it was supposed to be released in the world, except in France, where the director lives, and in the US, where he used to live. Go figure... I seized this magnificent opportunity and, so far, 82 independent theaters, in other words theaters that are not subject to paranoia or to some diktat of a few, have programmed the film with only two things in mind: the cinema and their audiences."

Alas, it's not certain that cinema will emerge greater from this muddled sketch, co-written by Polanski with his friend Jerzy Skolimowski, another immense filmmaker of the Polish New Wave. It's as if these two venerable creators (Polanski is in his 90s, Skolimovski in his 80s) had gotten together to have a great time late in life, writing this high-society satire they probably intended to evoke the spirit of Billy Wilder. It does not even come close.

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