An Officer and a Spy

I really loved this movie about an interesting story, well told by Polanski. There is an accurate research and a very good cinematographic transposition of what happened in France with the Affair Dreyfus, that many people still don't know. It is important to talk about it, especially with this pathos and care of the details. Definitely a movie to see.

The story is nothing revolutionary, no extra twist or suprise but the real gem here is the way the story is told and the movie was shot.

In contrast to the oversaturated Hollywood exhaustive action packed style this movie manages to tell the intriguing Dreyfus affair in France 1895 without unnecessary overdone action scenes/music whilst maintaining the core tension of the topic that doesn't let you off the hook.

When the movie was finished I couldn't believe that over 2h were over and I felt pleasantly refreshed and renewed, although I was constantly focused on what will happen next. That's the level of smoothness we are talking about here.

A connection to past Polanski or french movies is definitly visible and this way of storytelling can be thought of as a new take on it.

If you like historical dramas with a good portion of crime you should definitly take a look at this gem.

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.

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.

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