TV Review: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008)–***1/2
TV Review
In France, he’s desired, and in America, he’s wanted.
Roman Polanski’s films were often about the forces of corruption going up against justice and winning. It wasn’t hard to find a similar narrative in the story of Polanski’s high-profile 1977 trial, one where the charge of raping a 13-year-old girl are equally as heinous as the famed director’s treatment at the hands of a spotlight seeking judge.
The balanced, just-the-facts approach to Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired—a
documentary chronicling the events leading up to Polanski’s trial and his flight to France after pleading guilty to a lesser charge—forces the audience to search its own conscience to determine where corruption won and justice lost.
The backstory: Polanski was commissioned to photograph girls for a Vogue spread. Polanski had to this point managed to keep his lust for life despite a past marred with personal disasters. His mother was gassed by the Nazis. His father had been sent to Auschwitz. His pregnant wife Sharon Tate had been murdered at the hands of the Manson family in her Los Angeles home. On one photo shoot, he took a 13-year-old girl to the home of Jack Nicholson, who was out of town, photographed her and admittedly had sexual intercourse with the girl. The girl said she was raped, plied with booze and Quaaludes by the director.
Polanski’s hard-living ways, his exuberant personality, and his penchant for seducing teenage girls made the uber-talented Polanski a celebrity among direcotrs, and thus the target of a Judge Laurence J. Rittenband. The PR savvy Rittenband loved his Santa Monica courtroom, where he often presided over celebrity cases. He handpicked the Polanski case.
Polanski is not interviewed here. Nor is Rittenband, who died in 1993. The entire film is told from the perspective of eye-witnesses to the events, which puts even more pressure on the audience to sort through the details.
Where do you stop judging Polanski for what he did and where do you start blaming the situation on Rittenband for his corrupt, even criminal efforts to put Polanski in jail over the advice of authorities? The attempt to answer that question results in a demanding documentary, not unlike Capturing the Friedmans or Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (two of the most successful documentaries of the last 10 years).
It never seems like the job of this doc to uncover whether Polanski raped his victim or simply engaged in unlawful sexual intercourse (the charge he pled to). Instead it acts as a well-researched profile of a man who found anyway to survive despite moments of great struggle and injustice. Thirty-one years after the incident, the matter is as unsettled as the charges were unsettling. That may be the greatest injustice, not just for Polanski, but also for the victim and the American justice system.
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired premieres Monday, June 9, at 9 p.m. on HBO
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