Cinema, "The officer and the spy": Polanski tells the Dreyfus case

France, 1894, the Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus is arrested and convicted of high treason as allegedly passing important military secrets to a foreign power, Germany. This is the plot of "The Officer and the Spy" signed by Roman Polanski and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the recent Venice Film Festival.

Characters and circumstances are real: the French army at the end of the 800th century was still dealing with the wounds caused by the defeat in the previous Franco-Prussian war and the Dreyfus case lent itself perfectly to divert attention from its inefficiencies, corruptions and difficulties, to support political pressure and military men scurrying across the European continent. Furthermore, the artillery captain as a Jew represented the excellent victim in the growing anti-Semitic climate that was also spreading in France. 

The story in particular focuses on the figure who contributed significantly to restoring the truth with respect to a trial and subsequent conviction of Dreyfus clearly distorted by false documents and bogus testimonies. Major Georges Picquart, who became head of the secret services, realizes what has happened and fights to restore the truth and do justice to the captain who, in the meantime, has been confined to an island far from France. A strong woman intervenes to help him press campaign, supported by the well-known writer Émile Zola. Dreyfus will eventually be rehabilitated and the Major will become Minister of War.

The script appears somewhat cold, impersonal and does not give the characters the dramatic depth of the events that concern them. Everything appears aseptic and didactic and it is also difficult to support the natural, almost obligatory, human and cultural opposition to military narrow-mindedness. The Jewish question itself, which is fundamental for doing justice and holding up the entire scaffolding of the story narrated, fails to be sufficiently dramatized and underlined in its gravity due to the harmful consequences it will lead to, not only in France.

Even the acting doesn't seem up to par: the actors who also come from the prestigious Comédie Française, underlined with emphasis in the end credits, sometimes appear in plaster and slow. The whole film is proposed as a more or less faithful reconstruction of what happened without however bringing out any emotion more to what is already known. Of course, the same operation of bringing to mind not only a serious judicial misdeed but also recalling the dramatic origins of the many European ills is a cinematographically meritorious work in itself but it did not appear to us sufficient to deserve all the attention that Polański's work has received. 

It should be remembered that the Polish-born director is at the center of serious allegations of sexual assaults for which he was also arrested and convicted in the United States and was excluded from the Academy of the Oscars. It's a good movie, nothing more.