Section:GDN 1N PaGe:31 Edition Date:190830 Edition:03 Zone: Sent at 30/8/2019 0:12 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
Friday 30 Aug ust 2019 The Guardian •••News^31
Ven ice fi lm festivalPolanski denies claims of child
sexual abuse and satanism
Lanre Bakare
VeniceControversy around Roman Polanski
hung once again over the Venice fi lm
festival yesterday as he released press
notes for his new fi lm that sought to
discredit several women who claim
he sexually abused them as minors.
He also suggested that he has been
persecuted since the 1960s, when the
press insinuated he was a satanist after
the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by
members of the Manson Family.
In the press notes for his new fi lm,
An Offi cer and a Spy – about the anti-
semitic Dreyfus aff air – which has
its premiere today , the 86-year-old
Chinatown director is portrayed as
a persecuted victim of “neo feminist
McCarthyism” in an interview with the
French polemicist Pascal Bruckner.
The author compares Polanski’s
current treatment to what the directorXan BrooksB
rad Pitt is an
intergalactic Captain
Willard, taking a
fraught mission
up river in James
Gray’s Ad Astra, an
outer-space Apocalypse Now which
played to rapt crowds. In place
of steaming jungles, this gives us
existential chills. Instead of Viet
Cong soldiers, it provides man-
eating baboons and pirates riding
dune buggies. It’s an extraordinary
picture, steely and unbending and
assembled with an unmistakable
air of wild-eyed zealotry. Ad Astra,
be warned, is going all the way – and
it double-dares us to buckle up for
the trip.
Set in the near future, this
casts Pitt as Major Roy McBride,
a lonesome samurai who prides
himself on the fact his pulse rate has
never climbed beyond 80.
He’s travelling to Neptune in
search of his lost father, a man he
barely knows, and seeking to halt a
series of unexplained cosmic rays
that threaten life on Earth. Pitt
embodies McBride with a series of
deft gestures and a minimum of fuss.endured as “a Jew who was hunted
during the war and a fi lm-maker per-
secuted by the Stalinists in Poland”.
“Most of the people who harass me
do not know me and know nothing
about the case,” Polanski says when
asked how he would “survive the pre-
sent-day neo feminist McCarthyism ”.
“My work is not therapy. However, I
must admit that I’m familiar with
many of the workings of the appara-
tus of persecution shown in the fi lm,
and that has clearly inspired me.”
Bruckner also discusses the mur-
der of Sharon Tate , which the director
believes triggered the start of his
“persecution”.
“The press got hold of the tragedy
and, unsure of how to deal with it, cov-
ered it in the most despicable way,”
Polanski says.
“Implying, among other things, that
I was one of the people responsible
for her murder, against a background
of satanism.”Polanski also attempted to discredit
accusations by a number of women
who said he abused them when they
were under 18, calling them “absurd
stories by women I have never seen
before in my life who accuse me ofthings which supposedly happened
more than half a century ago”.
“Don’t you want to fi ght back?”
Bruckner asks. “What for? It’s like tilt-
ing at windmills,” responds Polanski.
Polanski also says a miscarriage of
justice such as the Dreyfus aff air could
happen today. “All the ingredients are
there for it to happen,” he says. “False
accusations, lousy court proceedings,
corrupt judges, and above all ‘social
media’ that convict and condemn
without a fair trial or a right of appeal.”
Luca Barbareschi, a producer of An
Offi cer and a Spy, threatened to pull the
fi lm after comments made by the chief
of the jury, Lucrecia Martel , that she
would not attend the gala dinner for
Polanski, although she agreed with the
fi lm being shown. Some media outlets
reported that she would not watch the
fi lm at all. Barbareschi demanded an
apology from Martel but she said her
“words were deeply misunderstood”.
The fi lm will premiere at Venice today.
This is the second day Polanski
has dominated the festival, after an
opening day press conference in which
Alberto Barbera , festival director , said
he was sure he had made the right
choice to include Polanski despite the
director’s conviction in 1978 for rap-
ing a 13-year-old girl in the US in 1977.Film review
Divorce tale
explores the
cost to heart
and wallet
Film review
Pitt reaches for
the stars in a
dark journey
into his past
Xan BrooksI
f you’re young, pretty and
privileged you have to
work doubly hard in order
to screw up your life. Just
ask Nicole and Charlie, the
gilded theatrical couple
in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage
Story. When we meet them they
are lounging about their nice New
York apartment, clearly in love and
bathed in soft winter light. Then
suddenly – boom – they are fi ling
for divorce and can’t bear to even sit
together on the subway back from
work. What the hell are they doing?
Neither of them are quite sure.
This is Baumbach’s second
fi lm for Netfl ix, following The
Meyerowitz Stories and surely partly
inspired by his own 2013 divorce
from the actor Jennifer Jason Leigh.
It boasts fi ne performances from
Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver,
box-fresh dialogue and a keen sense
of its own absurdity.
Once the divorce is in progress, it
swiftly gathers pace. Now Nicole’s
taken their eight-year-old son to Los
Angeles and Charlie is having to fi ght
his ex-wife for custody. She has hired
a lawyer (Laura Dern), which means
that he’s got one too – a rumpled
legal warrior called Bert Spitz
(perfectly played by Alan Alda). Our
antagonists perform complicated
manoeuvres so as to better position
themselves for the battle to come.
Baumbach’s fi lm is an ordeal –
intentionally so – and it relies on its
actors to pull the audience through.
Playing Charlie, the feted director of
avant-garde theatre, Driver begins
loose and rangy and then slowly
stiff ens and contracts, as if the
legal back-and-forth has bent his
body out of shape. Johansson, too,
manages some brilliantly textured
work as Nicole, a woman who longs
to strike out on her own but is never
fully convinced that the ends justify
the means. The fi lm – meaning
Baumbach – largely favours Charlie.
At one stage, Charlie retreats to a
back room to consult with Spitz. The
old attorney embarks on a rambling,
irrelevant gag about a woman
who planned to vacation in Rome.
Charlie is fi nally moved to interrupt.
“I’m sorry, Bert,” he says. “But am
I paying for this joke?” And yes, of
course that’s what he’s doing; as is
Nicole. The time keeps on ticking.
The bill keeps running up. Th e joke
is on them.Released on 15 NovemberMarriage Story
Venice fi lm festival
★★★★☆Ad Astra
Venice fi lm festival
★★★★★▲ Brad Pitt, Ruth Negg a, director
James Gray and Liv Tyler arrive
for the Venice premiere of Ad Astra
PHOTOGRAPH: YARA NARDI/REUTERSHis performance is so understated it
hardly looks like acting at all.
“In the end the son suff ers the sins
of the father,” McBride explains in
hushed voice-over. This is because
McBride Sr (Tommy Lee Jones) is
the fi lm’s Colonel Kurtz, a brilliant
astronaut who went awol years
before and may be responsible for
the current crisis. Roy’s bosses say
they want his father brought home,
whereas in fact they are secretly
planning to terminate his command.
Roy receives this information with
barely a fl icker of emotion. His
feelings about the old man have
always been confl icted.
Gray is an established purveyor
of big, brooding, ambitious cinema.
But he’s never made anything
as ambitious as this soaring
psychological space-opera. Ad Astra
is so serious that it verges on thesilly; so immaculately staged that it
sweeps us up in its orbit.
Roy docks at Mars, after which he
sets out on his own, 2.7bn miles from
home. And it’s at this point that the
fi lm begins to become an unblinking
parable of desperate fathers and
damaged sons. Having kept his
cool for so long, the astronaut
fi nds his pulse rate is spiking. So he
prepares to face his demons. He’s
travelling deeper into his own heart
of darkness as Ad Astra pitches from
full-blown horror to the thunderclap
of closure. In space, no one can hear
you scream for your dad.Ad Astra opens on 18 SeptemberPitt embodies
McBride with a series
of deft gestures and a
minimum of fuss. It’s
hardly acting at all▲ Roman Polanski was in an angry
mood before his new fi lm’s premiereRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws