Roman Polanski is radically unradical in this highly traditional historical drama, letting his inner Fred Zinnemann out (or is it William Wyler?) in another retelling of The Dreyfus Affair. Old-fashioned in the best sense of seamless Hollywood filmmaking, with pacing that takes the long view, allowing tension to build thru carefully measured doses of information and subtle changes in character, without avoiding the thousand shocks, suspenseful set pieces & courtroom drama (military & civilian) that flesh is heir to. If not for cinematographer Pawel Edelman’s modern underlit interiors* and some non-linear time-lapse ellipses, the film might pass for a near-classic from fifty years or so back. (That ‘near’ qualifier for the occasional feeling that Polanski errs on the side of ‘good taste,’ a bit more Eugène Delacroix composition overstatement and a bit less Jacques-Louis David gloss might have done the trick. But this is nitpicking. With unerring casting and meticulous period detail, the film is a paradigm of a type of undervalued (uncool) prestige middlebrow cinema now rarely seen.
DOUBLE-BILL: William Dieterle’s LIFE OF EMLE ZOLA/’37, like his other bio-pics with Paul Muni (and his makeup box) has fallen out of favor. But on their own terms, they remain largely effective, particularly ZOLA in its Dreyfus-centered second half.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *These interiors might have benefitted from film, rather than digital capture.
No comments:
Post a Comment