A good movie

Since I am a huge fan of Roman Polanski’s work, I was really eager to check it out. Well, to be honest, it turned out to be tricky to judge the damned thing. Indeed, it was his most accessible movie in years and, in production value, also one of his most ambitious. And, indeed, it was in general visually neat and very well directed. However, on the other hand, Polanski didn’t add anything really interesting or surprising to this story so the whole thing still felt rather generic. It didn’t help that there was an obvious attempt from Polanski to make a comparison between his own predicament with justice and what happened to Dreyfus, an attempt which felt terribly misguided. Indeed, even if they both might have been victim of a flawed justice system, Dreyfus was completely innocent and condemned only because he was Jewish whereas Polanski was after all probably guilty. Concerning the story itself, I’m not sure if it is well known abroad but it was one of the biggest scandals that ever took place in France so it was pretty neat to get a detailed account of what happened back then. Basically, it shows that 40 years before WWII, we were already plagued by some massive antisemitism and, obviously, not only in Germany. In my opinion, it also displayed the weakness of our modern justice system and I think it still applies for today, I’m afraid. Basically, even though some naïve people might argue otherwise, if the background of the accused (social, economic, ethnic) fits the bill, most of the the time, he/she will be condemned and the evidence eventually never really actually really matter because it can be completely twisted as it was displayed in this movie. I mean, in the US, how many innocent black men did end up in jail just because they simply fit the profile required by the accusation? Anyway, to conclude, even if it didn’t really impress me, it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you’re interested in Polanski’s work.

7/10