Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
Directed by Marina Zenovich
At the Quad Cinema
In a remarkable number of Roman Polanski’s films—Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Tess, Death and the Maiden—vulnerable, beautiful women are victimized by men. Men on the make. Men who view women as chattel. Men willing to set their wives up for a date with Satan for career advancement.
On one hand there is that deep, abiding sympathy for society’s victims. And then there is the contrapuntal vision Polanski himself has often offered to the public of a jet-setting swinger who in his ’70s salad days worked a gold chain and saucily unbuttoned shirt and indulged a taste for the milky, rosebud flesh of young girls. Roman Polanski, in life, has been as fascinatingly enigmatic as his films, with a personal back-story capable of trumping even his most bizarre fictions, and now it’s all dredged up in Marina Zenovich’s documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. The Polish director has experienced mind-blowing tragedy: the loss of his mother at Auschwitz, a childhood spent on the run observing firsthand the malfeasance of the human animal as he sought shelter from the Nazis, the brutal murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and unborn child in 1969 by the Charles Manson gang and a flight to France in 1978 to escape a rape conviction.
Despite a creepy predilection for young girls freely admitted to in an interview with Clive James excerpted in the doc, Polanski, as seen through director Marina Zenovich’s eyes is also a remarkably sympathetic figure, both predatory and preyed upon. Zenovich’s film Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired touches on the films (with clips from Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, Chinatown and others) and Polanski’s personal life. But its meat and potatoes is the scandalously mishandled rape case presided over by a judge more interested in playing to an audience of press and public than he was in justice.
The focus of Wanted and Desired is one of Polanski’s many ordeals; his charge in 1977 for the rape of a 13-year-old girl, Samantha (Gailey) Geimer, during a photo shoot at Jack Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive home. The conviction of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor” eventually led to his flight to France where he remains a fugitive. Zenovich hones in on that case as the tragedy that transformed Polanski from tragic to seedy. The crime itself in Zenovich’s hands, is less worthy of analysis as the aftermath, and a limelight-seeking Judge Laurence Rittenband whose decisions were warped by publicity surrounding the case.
Zenovich has tapped a documentary goldmine, securing interviews with not only Polanski’s defense attorney, but the prosecution, the investigating officer and the rape victim, now a grown woman with her own children and a sense of bitter disgust at the excesses of the press and the justice system. Centering on interviews with the legal eagles rather than celebs like Nicholson or Polanski (though she does snag some thoughtful testimony from Mia Farrow), Zenovich interviews Polanski’s attorney Douglas Dalton, assistant district attorney Roger Gunson and the victim herself, still apple-cheeked but significantly older and wiser at 45. Even Geimer seems less disgusted by Polanski (who she publicly forgave in 1997) than by Rittenband and the various men who interrogated her about the crime. She indicates that the inquisition may have been more traumatic than the rape. “You can’t stop it once it starts,” she laments, her own lawyer by her side. Some of the most telling footage is from Polanski’s point of view as he makes his way through a Santa Monica courthouse, dozens of cameramen and reporters setting upon him like flies. But the American press was, apparently, no match for the European corps, who not only revealed the rape victim’s name and details of her private life, but they stalked her at home and at school.
Forget Red State and Blue State. The essential divide in Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired is between Europe and America. Europe is a welcoming bosom and artistic haven where America’s jailbird becomes France’s inductee into the Academie des Beaux-Arts. Puritanical America was another story. Reporter Richard Brenneman, who covered the rape trial for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, spoke on the less hagiographic American approach to Polanski: While Europeans hailed his genius the Americans saw him as a, “sort of malignant, twisted dwarf with this dark vision.” In this documentary, the dwarf finally gets his due, fleshed out as a person rather than simply a media sensation.
Directed by Marina Zenovich
At the Quad Cinema
In a remarkable number of Roman Polanski’s films—Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Tess, Death and the Maiden—vulnerable, beautiful women are victimized by men. Men on the make. Men who view women as chattel. Men willing to set their wives up for a date with Satan for career advancement.
On one hand there is that deep, abiding sympathy for society’s victims. And then there is the contrapuntal vision Polanski himself has often offered to the public of a jet-setting swinger who in his ’70s salad days worked a gold chain and saucily unbuttoned shirt and indulged a taste for the milky, rosebud flesh of young girls. Roman Polanski, in life, has been as fascinatingly enigmatic as his films, with a personal back-story capable of trumping even his most bizarre fictions, and now it’s all dredged up in Marina Zenovich’s documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. The Polish director has experienced mind-blowing tragedy: the loss of his mother at Auschwitz, a childhood spent on the run observing firsthand the malfeasance of the human animal as he sought shelter from the Nazis, the brutal murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and unborn child in 1969 by the Charles Manson gang and a flight to France in 1978 to escape a rape conviction.
Despite a creepy predilection for young girls freely admitted to in an interview with Clive James excerpted in the doc, Polanski, as seen through director Marina Zenovich’s eyes is also a remarkably sympathetic figure, both predatory and preyed upon. Zenovich’s film Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired touches on the films (with clips from Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, Chinatown and others) and Polanski’s personal life. But its meat and potatoes is the scandalously mishandled rape case presided over by a judge more interested in playing to an audience of press and public than he was in justice.
The focus of Wanted and Desired is one of Polanski’s many ordeals; his charge in 1977 for the rape of a 13-year-old girl, Samantha (Gailey) Geimer, during a photo shoot at Jack Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive home. The conviction of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor” eventually led to his flight to France where he remains a fugitive. Zenovich hones in on that case as the tragedy that transformed Polanski from tragic to seedy. The crime itself in Zenovich’s hands, is less worthy of analysis as the aftermath, and a limelight-seeking Judge Laurence Rittenband whose decisions were warped by publicity surrounding the case.
Zenovich has tapped a documentary goldmine, securing interviews with not only Polanski’s defense attorney, but the prosecution, the investigating officer and the rape victim, now a grown woman with her own children and a sense of bitter disgust at the excesses of the press and the justice system. Centering on interviews with the legal eagles rather than celebs like Nicholson or Polanski (though she does snag some thoughtful testimony from Mia Farrow), Zenovich interviews Polanski’s attorney Douglas Dalton, assistant district attorney Roger Gunson and the victim herself, still apple-cheeked but significantly older and wiser at 45. Even Geimer seems less disgusted by Polanski (who she publicly forgave in 1997) than by Rittenband and the various men who interrogated her about the crime. She indicates that the inquisition may have been more traumatic than the rape. “You can’t stop it once it starts,” she laments, her own lawyer by her side. Some of the most telling footage is from Polanski’s point of view as he makes his way through a Santa Monica courthouse, dozens of cameramen and reporters setting upon him like flies. But the American press was, apparently, no match for the European corps, who not only revealed the rape victim’s name and details of her private life, but they stalked her at home and at school.
Forget Red State and Blue State. The essential divide in Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired is between Europe and America. Europe is a welcoming bosom and artistic haven where America’s jailbird becomes France’s inductee into the Academie des Beaux-Arts. Puritanical America was another story. Reporter Richard Brenneman, who covered the rape trial for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, spoke on the less hagiographic American approach to Polanski: While Europeans hailed his genius the Americans saw him as a, “sort of malignant, twisted dwarf with this dark vision.” In this documentary, the dwarf finally gets his due, fleshed out as a person rather than simply a media sensation.
