In my diary yesterday on child rapist Roman Polanski, his defenders there kept preaching the documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" as if it somehow absolves Polanski of all his sins. This documentary, we are told, is just like Dick Cheney's hidden documents in that it explains everything and maybe he was in the right after all.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to watch a pro-rapist movie. However, I found someone that did, Bill Wyman, and here is what he has to say about this rapist apology:
Bad art is supposed to be harmless, but the 2008 film "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," about the notorious child-sex case against the fugitive director, has become an absolute menace.
Nice powerful intro there, but let's get to a little bit of the meat of the argument.
In "Wanted and Desired," it's weird how detached Zenovich stays from the victim, and how she undermines her in subtle ways. The tone is set early on, when a friend of Polanski's tells of being woken up and informed that the director had been arrested. The moment is actually played for laughs, with interspersed shots of a worried Mia Farrow using the phone in a scene from "Rosemary's Baby."
A filmmaker attuned to the psychological undercurrents of the characters in her drama might have been conscious of the state of a 13-year-old girl, who had just been drugged and raped and had spent the next period of time at a police station reliving the incident; and shaken by the story of "Rosemary's Baby" -- that, too, about a horrifically abused woman.
But the scene isn't used to illustrate the victim's story -- it's about poor Roman. He's the person making the desperate phone call. It's an odd juxtaposition when you think about it. That's when the friend, having just been told Polanski has been arrested, says, "This is somebody who could not be a rapist!" Here again, Zenovich is playing with semantics. It's obvious the friend was saying he couldn't imagine Polanski, say, following a woman down the street and grabbing her in an alley.
It sounds more like propaganda rather than a strong defense to me. Here's a little more:
The movie tries to drum up sympathy for Polanski by playing up the media firestorm he was at the center of; but that's Polanski's fault, too. (Before they rape children, celebrities should consider how the media attention sure to result will have adverse consequences for their victims, as well as themselves.) Celebrities complain about "the dishonesty of the media," as Polanski does repeatedly in the film, only when the dishonesty doesn't suit them. If the coverage helps you -- a portrayal as devoted husband, say -- then it's fine, true or not. But when it doesn't, they scream.
But that's just the Polanski team's legal strategy: keeping as many balls in the air as possible to make it seem as if the director has something to negotiate with, which he hasn't. Around the time of the documentary's release, they actually cut a deal to settle the case -- but balked at the prospect of cameras in the court. This too was an irony, considering that Roman Polanski got himself into trouble with a camera so many years ago. Thirty years later, the director was still trying to call the shots.
The full two page review is well worth reading, so please head over to Salon.com and check it out here. This movie is not the Holy Grail his defenders think it is; instead, it's a painfully obvious attempt to whitewash the heinous crimes of an unrepentant child predator.