The César Awards – basically the French Oscars – happened today, and I have almost nothing to say about them, save for the Best Director category, which seemed like an elaborate prank on the #MeToo movement and any cinephile with half a conscience. Roman Polanski won the award for his latest French film, An Officer and a Spy, which is about a wrongly-convicted prisoner – bit of wishful thinking, if you ask me. For the uninitiated, Polanski was charged with sexually assaulting a thirteen-year-old in 1977. Upon hearing that the judge was going to give him 50 years in prison (which sounds reasonable to me), he did a runner and ended up in France, where he’s stayed for the past forty years. Clearly overseas being a paedophile isn’t as big a deal as it is in the United States, because since then he’s directed (by my count) thirteen films, the most well-known of which being The Pianist.
Side note: I should probably add at this point that I do believe in separating the artist from the art form. I’m not going to stand here and deny that Harvey Weinstein produced some great movies, that Kevin Spacey turned in some excellent performances and Roman Polanski directed some bangers. However, giving a film with questionable people involved Best Picture (i.e. valuing the overall work over any one contribution) is quite a different kettle of fish from singling out the questionable person and giving them a Best Director award all for themselves, which is where my issues with this lie.
An Officer and a Spy (or J’Accuse, as it’s known in France) has failed to materialise in the United States (or in Australia, for that matter), so very few English-language critics have gotten to give it a geez. It’s a similar situation to that of A Rainy Day in New York, the 2019 Woody Allen film that didn’t get a release outside of Europe and Asia.
Side note: I was on a plane last December and saw Rainy Day on its in-flight entertainment. I briefly considered watching it so I could come back to my Aussie cinephile friends and brag about watching a movie that they couldn’t legally see, but then I realised that I honestly couldn’t be arsed to sit through a Woody Allen film where the main character is named ‘Gatsby Welles.’
Like I said, the French don’t seem to mind Polanski’s questionable life choices, and so his film picked up twelve nominations at the Césars. Tensions were already riding high given the large mob outside protesting the nominations (Polanski, star Jean Dujardin and producer Alain Goldman didn’t come to the ceremony, with Goldman citing the reason being ‘an escalation of inappropriate and violent language and behaviour’ directed at Polanski. Maybe Goldman should have considered the inappropriate and violent language and behaviour Polanski directed at Samantha Gailey – just a thought) and the fact that Officer and a Spy had already picked up two awards that night, including one shared by Polanski for Adapted Screenplay.
The reaction to Polanski winning Best Director was pretty hilarious. Barely anyone applauded and a bunch of people (including Portrait of a Lady on Fire actress Adèle Haenel) walked out. As you can imagine, this result did not go down well with the protesters outside.
Thing is, this win for a man who has been a known sex offender for forty years isn’t even the strangest award that Polanski has won since 1977. At least the Césars are foreign. In 2003, the Academy Awards – part of the same country that had been trying to arrest Polanski for nearly three decades – awarded Polanski the Best Director Oscar for The Pianist… and nobody batted an eyelid. What the hell?
The only conclusion that we can draw from these events is that awards season is a strange and loopy time of year.
Beyond the Popcorn 