An Officer and a Spy

Based on the great book of Robert Harris. This is the story of a wrongfully accused army man,who also was a jew. And the thing is, that the people who decided what was good or bad in the army ,hated jews. If you have a strong sense of justice and you do not like racism this is your movie. Well made by Polanski but the story is the reason to watch it.

You know the story. Roman Polanski explores its mechanism. And, scene by scene, the case Dreyfus becomes a contemporary story. It is a film with so many virtues than "see it!" remains the only reasonable advice. One motif - Jean Dujardin who gives an admirable proof of his art. And, of course ,Louis Garrel as Alfred Dreifus. A film about justice. Like each Polanski work, precise, slow and being more than a historical story but reflection of darkness behind and, for many reasons, around us.

A great film on all accounts. Fantastic direction and recreation of a terrible period in France. The sets, the costumes are just fantastic. Not to mention the actors, who for a large part come from the Comédie Française, a theatrical institution in France. In a time of intolerance this film reminds us that there are great principles that are worth fighting for.

An Officer and a Spy comes out and reminds us that Roman Polanski is a master of cinema. Not objectionable. Leaning again on the writer Robert Harris, he curates the painting, composition, faces and atmosphere, and chisels a warning about that and this France, Europe, the world: anti-Semitism, of course, the friability of justice and the perniciousness of the system, of course, but also personal punishment and individual responsibility. His approach, compared to the Dreyfus case, is thriller: another man in the shadows, at least in the widespread recognition of History (we are talking about Piquart, more than Dreyfus), and other plots to be foiled, step by step, hearing and cell after cell. Other, with extreme dedication to the truth of the facts, the historical truth.

Of the captain of Jewish origin Alfred Dreyfus - embodied by Louis Garrel - accused in 1894 of having passed military information to the Germans and sentenced to life imprisonment on the island of the Devil, Polanski decrypts the systemic lie concocted against him: non-existent and artificial evidence, rising anti-Semitism; illuminates the "cure", since a public letter to the President of the Republic, the writer Èmile Zola, took a stand on the affair with the famous J'accuse, but following Harris's escort he follows the story from the perspective of officer George Piquart (Jean Dujardin), who as the new head of counterintelligence investigates the flow of information to the Germans. No, after Dreyfus's arrest he did not stop.

Co-produced with France by Italy, Luca Barbareschi and Rai Cinema, J'accuse praises (doing one's own) duty, ridicules the pompous and fatuous high offices, the corral and current subordinates, disrupts the gear of power , the institutionalized homo homini lupus, and opens to residual hope: it is up to man, indeed, to a man to know why he can no longer be ignored, discover why he can no longer annihilate, free himself so that he can no longer unjustly punish.

Dujardin has calm, elegance and probity, Garrel is perfect, Polanski can also count on his wife Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric and Denis Podalydès, and the film greatly benefits from them: thriller by genre, human comedy for profit, political treatise by analysis, great cinema by images. Polanski does not give himself airs, except those of Alexandre Desplat, he does not strut, he only makes us see better: the long focal lengths of history, our here and now. Whoever forgets is an accomplice, indeed, an executioner.

Not a single f-word, no sexual scene and a brilliant movie. Hollywood doesn't know to do that anymore.