Thirty years ago, Roman Polanski fled to Paris after a liaison in L.A. with a 13-year-old girl. Less well-known are the details of the legal case against the director and the views of those involved: With the benefit of hindsight, even the D.A. prosecuting the case admits to a bit of sympathy for a man long painted as a kind of devil by his enemies. Even the now-middle-aged victim has admitted that she can't exactly blame Polanski for taking flight.
In the HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, these two former adversaries (among many others) testify, in a manner of speaking, in the director's defense. Polanski's episode with the girl is presented in the context of the other cataclysms in the Polish émigré's personal epic — including concentration camp Nazis who savaged the family he was born into along with Charles Manson's homicidal acolytes who destroyed the family he was just starting.
Polanski should certainly count himself among his numerous enemies, but as we learn in this film, one particular villain is responsible for his ongoing legal limbo: Judge Laurence J. Rittenband, dead for 15 years, whose vanity led him to turn Polanski's trial into a publicity plaything. Of course, it helped his aims that Polanski was a pleasure-seeker and nightmare-peddler who had left European darkness for the Southern California light, along the way crafting the devil-summoning Rosemary's Baby into a lasting stylistic signpost. To see Polanski through the archival footage of that time is to see Warren Beatty's Shampoo character come to life, haunting rarefied drawing rooms and squiring starlets around movie premieres. And though the diminutive man in the double-breasted suit with the lapels out to his shoulders seemed an unlikely paramour for the lissome Sharon Tate, the couple forged a deep bond; soon the actress was pregnant, the father ecstatic.
Of course, what happened next is a virtual film-noir cut-to, eerily flooded with soft seventies sunshine: the Manson family massacre that claimed Tate and her unborn baby; then, in the years of grief that followed, Polanski's engagement with an almost predatory lust. And then the day in 1977 in Jack Nicholson's Mulholland Drive aerie, when Polanski crossed certain private thresholds that every grown man understands to be objectionable.
The film's director, Marina Zenovich, is neither executioner nor exonerator. Instead, she clarifies the legal murk and, clear-eyed, depicts the supporting players in the drama. The important questions are left for the viewer to ponder: Did the judge and a complicit media exploit Roman Polanski more thoroughly than he exploited the girl? In this rendering, Polanski simply did as he had always done — achieve what he could while defying the myriad forces that had always seemed violently marshaled against him.
