Tomorrow, January 27, a new restoration of Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist opens at New York’s Film Forum. This piece, which first appeared in the publication formerly known as Salon, is from a time when it was still possible to discuss Polanski’s films rationally. I don’t have hope of that being possible any time soon, which keeps us from acknowledging that Polanski’s late work—this movie, Death and the Maiden, his adaptation of Oliver Twist, and his film on the Dreyfus Affair, An Officer and a Spy, unreleased in America and one of the great movies of the last twenty years, constitute a vivid and sustained examination of victimization and how victims do and don’t keep their humanity. That that conversation can not occur is one of the disgraces of our era.
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