Salon.com MobileMore than 30 years after he raped a 13-year-old girl, the fugitive director hoped a skewed documentary would reopen his case. Thankfully, a judge said no dice.
Bad art is supposed to be harmless, but the 2008 film "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," about the notorious child-sex case against the fugitive director, has become an absolute menace. For months, lawyers for the filmmaker have been maneuvering to get the Los Angeles courts to dismiss Polanski's 1978 conviction, based on supposed judicial misconduct uncovered in the documentary. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that if Polanski, who fled on the eve of his sentencing, in March 1978, wanted to challenge his conviction, he could -- by coming back and turning himself in.
Espinoza was stating the obvious: Fugitives don't get to dictate the terms of their case. Polanski, who had pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, was welcome to return to America, surrender, and then petition the court as he wished. Indeed, the judge even gave Polanski more than he deserved, saying that he might actually have a case. "There was substantial, it seems to me, misconduct during the pendency of this case," he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "Other than that, he just needs to submit to the jurisdiction of the court."
Polanski deserves to have any potential legal folderol investigated, of course. But the fact that Espinoza had to state the obvious is testimony to the ways in which the documentary, and much of the media coverage the director has received in recent months, are bizarrely skewed. The film, which has inexplicably gotten all sorts of praise, whitewashes what Polanski did in blatant and subtle fashion -- and recent coverage of the case, in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and elsewhere, has in turn accepted the film's contentions at face value.
For now, the Los Angeles judge has injected a dose of reality into the debate. But "Wanted and Desired" seems to have inserted into the public consciousness the idea that Polanski, an irrepressible European, had been naughty during a colorful time, and that he has been toyed with by a monstrous legal system. Creepy and disturbing, the film does show us a few of the director's moral warts. But it leaves the strong impression that Polanski was a wronged man, jerked around by a cartoony, publicity-hungry judge to the point where fleeing was his only viable option.
"Wanted and Desired" is directed by Marina Zenovich. Previously she had made well-received documentaries about the Sundance Film Festival and France's charismatic Bernard Tapie, who owned a chain of health stores and sponsored a famous cycling team, which included Tour de France winner Greg LeMond. Tapie later got into trouble with the law for fixing soccer games, and after spending time in prison, became an actor.
In "Wanted and Desired," Zenovich casts Polanski, whose face repeatedly fills the screen with a Byronic luminosity, as a tragic figure, a child survivor of the Holocaust haunted by the murder of his wife, the actress Sharon Tate, at the hands of the Manson family. His friends are uniformly supportive: "This is somebody who could not be a rapist!" one exclaims.
As for the judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, why, he's a risible self-promoter. If Polanski is Byron, the judge is an Oliver Hardy or a Billy Gilbert, all but twiddling his tie in a series of ever-more-comical photographs. He actually kept a scrapbook about the celebrities who came through his Santa Monica courtroom. He had two girlfriends.
Now, that's one way to portray those two men -- and one that Polanski's current lawyers would prefer. But there's another way, too: You could show one as a child-sex predator who drugged a 13-year-old girl with quaaludes and champagne; lured her to pose for naked photographs; ignoring her protests, had sex with her; and then anally raped her.
The other could be cast as a canny jurist -- possibly a brilliant one, smart enough to have gone from high school directly to Harvard Law and graduated so young he wasn't allowed to take the bar exam -- who may have gone too far in his intent to block off the legal escape hatches celebrity wrongdoers use.
The truth is somewhere in between, but it's probably a lot closer to the second version. Yet that initial stark contrast -- the tragic hero, the goofy jurist -- permeates the film. Documentarians should have a wide leeway to argue their case the way they want, but there's a point at which ethical lines are crossed. Zenovich, like many other chroniclers to the stars, seems to have been blinded by her contact with Polanski.
Here's an example: The word "sodomy" is briefly referenced in Zenovich's documentary, but it's a somewhat ambiguous term, and it's never explained. Zenovich has fun flashing bits of the victim's grand jury testimony on the screen, but she never gets around to using this exchange from that testimony, which was made public in 2003 and published by the Smoking Gun:
"Then he lifted up my legs and went in through my anus."
"What do you mean by that?
"He put his penis in my butt."
In the girl's grand jury testimony, which is slightly sickening to read, she also said that she had repeatedly told Polanski no, but that she was too afraid of him to resist.
It's a drag to include a scene of anal rape of a 13-year-old in your moody documentary about such a Byronic figure, but it's also fairly relevant.
At the same time, Zenovich doesn't have time to tell us about the exceptional back story of Rittenband. In other words, she withholds the most damaging bit of information about Polanski from her viewers, and the most favorable bit of information about the judge.
Zenovich seems to have a tin ear when it comes to sexual politics, too. The film spends a lot of time telling us that Rittenband apparently had two girlfriends, using some goofy graphics to underscore the point. Zenovich doesn't say the judge was married, so it's not clear exactly why this information is relevant. But given what Polanski is accused of, the irony seems to be that the judge was a womanizer, too.
But Polanski, of course, wasn't on trial for womanizing. He was on trial for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. The director's ear, here as elsewhere, seems a bit … continental when it comes to such issues.
