I didn’t know who Roman Polanski was until I was a budding teenage cinephile. I had seen Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown before I knew anything about the director’s storied past or his “fugitive” status in the US. I was already, as they say, in his corner. In fact, it wasn’t until he was in the Oscar race for The Pianist when I became fully aware of his long history of controversy as a public figure. Call it ignorance if you will but it was blissful ignorance -- as a movie lover I’ve always cared more about what filmmakers and actors put onscreen than what they do or who they are off-screen. That Oscar race restored the media fascination with the decades old “unlawful sexual intercourse” case which resulted in one of the world’s most important directors fleeing Hollywood (and any country with an extradition agreement with the US for that matter) for good.
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, by documentary filmmaker Marina Zenovich reexamines the intricacies of the lengthy court battles while also gazing at the “shadow” that seemed to hang over Polanski. Few modern A list auteurs have had as difficult a life: After living in the Krakow ghetto in Poland, his mother died in the Nazi concentration camps. Later after finding fame and fortune his wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family in 1969. A decade later the sex crime case would forever alter his career. He is still considered a "fugitive from justice" in the United States. Zenovich wisely keeps the focus of her documentary on the case but she does draw minor attention to the shifting public perceptions of Polanski as a celebrity and filmmaker during the 70s and to his film career. For this, essentially the background of time and place, she uses photographs from the time period which paint a quick portrait of his glitzier days as an A list director with a swirling hard partying entourage of famous Hollywood players. She also employs a limited amount of industry talking heads. Mia Farrow appears briefly to talk about Rosemary’s Baby and Polanski’s relationship to his deceased wife Sharon Tate.
Film clips from Polanski’s filmography are also used, mostly for their unintended correlation to the events of the case or this documentary’s script. Though some of these moments are amusing and film clips are always welcome in Hollywood documentaries, the device doesn’t always work. Zenovitch shrugs off reductive public notions about Polanski’s “dark side” that come from reevaluating his films in the context of the sex crime and his wife’s murder. But the film clips sometimes amount to the same this equals that simplification, even if they’re meant only to lighten the piece. What’s most interesting about Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired is the correlations director Marina Zenovitch draws between the diminutive director and the infamous Judge Rittenband who presided over the case. Zenovitch propses that Rittenband fancied himself an auteur of the courtroom, all controlling of the narrative and insensitively pushing his actors (Polanski and the prosecuting and defense attorneys) around on set. Polanski himself compares the Judge to an ‘abominable cat playing with a mouse’ --Polanski being the mouse, you see. Just a tiny bit of research into Zenovitch’s own directorial career sheds even more light on this duel directorial theme. She began her career with the documentary Independent’s Day (1998) which itself focuses on directors. Her own quote on her debut:
I went from filming obsessive filmmakers to becoming one
With Roman Polanski Wanted or Desired, she’s still doing just that.
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