Yes! I’ve finally managed to see Polanski’s J’ACCUSE with English subtitles, something our capitalist system has not chosen to make commercially available. Thanks to the subs I could recognise the faint allusion to CHINATOWN above.
J’ACCUSE is excellent — after the lacklustre D’APRES UNE HISTOIRE VRAI, a thriller without thrills, and the fair-to-middlebrow CARNAGE (Polanski has his middlebrow side), this one is really absorbing. As script collaborator, Robert Harris brings much of the same solid craft that made THE GHOST / THE GHOST WRITER a success (and here we again have a choice of titles, with the leaden AN OFFICER AND A SPY for those to whom Zola’s celebrated title means nothing; wasted effort since the film doesn’t seem to have screened in any anglophone territories).
It has only a few of the keen, imaginative flourishes I love in this filmmaker’s work, only a few things only his peculiar mind would think of — for instance, there’s no mysterious squeaking that resolves into a man cleaning a limo with chamois leather — but it finds its own way into the familiar story and takes you there and holds you.
I wasn’t hugely keen on the transitions into flashback, a little fancy and digital for such a classical piece of storytelling. But there are other things that are more powerful. Right after Polanski does a CGI-assisted zoom into a finger pointing out Devil’s Island on the globe, he shows Dreyfus being locked in his cell; looking out the window; his view; a reverse angle showing his prison; the same, from further away, showing the whole island; further again, the island diminished to a speck; further still more, the island vanished completely in the limitless blue.
Astute, precise, merciless.
shadowplay 