An Officer and a Spy (2019)

The Dreyfus affair has been filmed before, and Roman Polanski's An Officer and a Spy approaches it the way a tax auditor approaches a ledger. Every document is produced, every graphologist consulted, every perjured witness seated in a row. Jean Dujardin plays Picquart with the weariness of a man who has read the file and cannot unread it. The Belle Époque sets are immaculate, the corridors are long, and the screenplay, adapted by Polanski and Robert Harris from Harris's novel, moves with the grim patience of an institution closing ranks. This is patient, cold, and superbly engineered cinema.

It is not a sermon. The antisemitism that drives the plot is stated plainly, because in 1894 France it was stated plainly. Officers remark that the Jew makes a perfect scapegoat, and the film reports this without a modern narrator stepping in to explain why that was regrettable. That restraint is the whole of the picture's social program. Women appear as wives and spectators, present but never arguing. The enemy is the army, never the market. Nobody lectures us about the climate, the body, or the brain, and the historical record is dramatized as it stands, unrevised. The moral weight sits in the miscarriage of justice and nowhere else.

Then there is the accident of its reception. Polanski's own case followed the film to Venice and beyond, and the jury president found herself explaining that she could not separate the man from the work. French feminist groups blockaded cinemas upon release. The César for Best Director was met with a walkout. The film itself sits in its period costume and says nothing about any of it. A curious vintage: technically assured, morally sober, and nearly innocent of contemporary instruction. The accounting continues elsewhere, and the cellar remains cold.