Roman Polanski

The latest from his cinema,The pianist (2002) has served to settle accounts with the beginning. The death of his mother in Auschwitz in 1941 and the experience of the Krakow ghetto marked his childhood and subsequent personal development. It was a subject that she carried deep inside, and that he has only been able to address, in an indirect way, recently adapting the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman . The entire second section of the film, the solitude of the protagonist, also connected with the closed, mental or geographical spaces, where his first feature films were developed, such asThe knife in the water (1962).

Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933, but his roots were clearly Polish, and in fact the family moved to Krakow when he was three years old. The tragic spirit that he flutters in his work connects deeply with the sensitivity of his country, hard hit by the vicissitudes of history. In Poland he studied at an art school, and began in the world of theater as an actor; he also prepares for the cinema at the Lodz Institute. His screen debut was made by acting in Pokolonie (1955), the first film by Andrzej Wajda . Later, behind the camera, he hardened himself as a filmmaker shooting shorts. There, a somewhat morbid sensitivity is uncovered, which will accompany him throughout his life: violence and voyeurism make an appearance in his work. In the knife…, his feature debut, Jerzy Skolimoswski helps him with the script. The success of the film is indisputable, including an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. It is the moment that she chooses to leave her country. In France he meets who will be his regular co-writer, Gérard Brach , and there he shootsRepulsion (1965) andCul de sac (1966), titles that insist on his disenchanted vision of life, which seems to him nothing short of absurd.

The next step in his career as a globetrotting filmmaker takes him to England, where he makes a peculiar parody of horror films,The Vampire Ball (1967). In Hollywood they like what “the Polish filmmaker” does, and their treatment of anguish and the fantastic world seems ideal for him to take on the adaptation of a best-seller by Ira Levin :Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Polanski, when it comes to drawing the world of the demonic, creates a disturbing atmosphere, playing with a studied ambiguity, which makes us doubt the sanity of Mia Farrow , who thinks that her neighbors are satan worshipers. When his pregnant wife, Shaton Tate, is tragically murdered the following year in their home (Roman was absent), the circumstances and the perpetrator of the crime, Charles Manson, are linked to satanic rites. Curiously, the devil will have a presence in Polanski’s cinema again years later when he adapts the novel “El club Dumas” by Arturo Pérez-Reverte with the title ofThe ninth gate . She had previously tried to exorcise her personal demons by rollingTess (1979), romantic adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel . Although during the ten years between the murder and the film he has not stopped making films – an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” in 1971, a magnificent sample of film noir,Chinatown (1973), and two other smaller titles,What? (1973) andThe chimerical tenant (1976)– and they present a scandal, the relationship with a minor, which becomes a complaint for rape. Polanski evades US justice and settles in Paris; there he will marry the actress Emmanuelle Seigner , but not even the Oscar for best director for The Pianist , twenty-six years later, will make it possible for him to return to Hollywood.

Undoubtedly, Polanski is an uneven director, but one whose risk capacity must be recognized.Pirates (1986) is a failure in the attempt to recover the genre.Frantic (1988) is an entertaining suspense film, indebted to Hitchcock. He returned through the twists and turns of sadomasochism in the failedGall Moons (1992). And she dared to adapt the play by Chilean Ariel Dorfman La muerte y la doncella (1994), a shocking denunciation of the torture practiced during the Pinochet regime, and in some way preparation for his approach to the holocaust in El pianista . He is now involved in an adaptation of “Oliver Twist” by Dickens. Will the child whose childhood died the day he suffered anti-Semitic persecution finally emerge?