If Roman Polanski’s life were a film, it would certainly be a drama, but it’s difficult to determine what kind of drama. Encompassing elements of Holocaust tragedy, macabre horror flick and engrossing courtroom battle, the life story of the Polish director has been, as a recent biography puts it, “even stranger than fiction.” Polanski: A Biographyby Christopher Sanford (2008, Palgrave Macmillan, 387 pages, U.S.$29.95) takes a look at the life and work of one of the world’s most tortured auteurs. Although the biography is unauthorized, Sanford, a British film and music reviewer who has also written biographies of Kurt Cobain, Eric Clapton, David Bowie and many others, brings a thoughtful and well-informed point of view to the career of a man who, at various points over the past 40 years, was a household name around the world. Polanski’s prowess as a director is undeniable. One only has to look at his filmography — Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and Oscar-winning The Pianist to name a few — to realize that he is one of Hollywood’s greatest talents. Unfortunately, he has spent his life in the spotlight more for his tabloidworthy personal life than for his achievements in film. However, as it is often impossible to divorce a man’s life from his work, it must be noted that in addition to landing him on the cover of the National Enquirer, Polanski’s encounters with massacre on a grand scale and his struggles with personal demons may have also done much to shape his unique, markedly dark perspective. Three events stand out as turning points in the director’s life: his experience during the German occupation of Poland, the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the Manson Family and the charges levied against him for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. Traces of these incidents have a way of popping up in Polanski’s movies, whether it be in the general mood of a piece, or scenes pulled directly from his memory, which Sanford refers to as “biographical detritus.” Polanksi was born Rajmund Roman Thierry Polañski on August 18, 1933 in Paris. His parents, Polish émigrés to France, made the dire misstep of moving their young family back to Krakow on the verge of Hitler’s ascendance. For the next 12 years, Polanski and his family watched Krakow deteriorate as they were shuffled from one ghetto slum to the next. As Sanford points out, Polanski would mine the visual and emotional landscape of those horrific years for material 63 years later in his Holocaust drama The Pianist. The director’s interest in film dates back to his childhood in the Jewish ghettos of Krakow, where as Sanford puts it, “he would often pass himself off as a German in order to buy a cheap ticket to the cinema.” That young Polanski would risk his life to go to the movies is indicative of the almost obsessive affinity he felt for the medium, even at a young age. In 1943, as 10-year-old Polanski looked on, his mother was rounded up by the SS and shipped off to Auschwitz V I D E O • A G E MA R C H/ AP R I L 2 0 0 9 12 B o o k R e v i e w Even Stranger Than His Films: The Life of Roman Polanski on the outskirts of Krakow. His father met the same fate nine days later. Remarkably, the Polanskis were able to save their son by sending him to board with a family of Catholics in a nearby village and changing his name several times (which is how he ended up with the altered name). Sanford theorizes throughout the book that Polanski’s traumatic upbringing greatly influenced the tone of his later movies. He points to the “sense of exile” cultivated in Polanski’s youth as well as a fixation on death and the view that human beings are essentially cruel as the fallout of his years spent living side by side with atrocity. The most interesting part of the book is the discussion of Sharon Tate’s murder in the summer of 1969. Shortly after Polanski had his first mainstream success with Rosemary’s Baby, a very pregnant Tate was killed in the couple’s secluded home in the Hollywood Hills. While Polanski was in London working on a film, four followers of Charles Manson, known as the Manson Family cult, broke into the house and killed everyone on the premises. The massacre was random, baffling and mind-blowingly gruesome, and the media circus that followed only made things worse for the stricken director. According to Sanford, it prompted reporters to “openly speculate about the Polanskis’ home life, where a wide knowledge of drugs, black magic and unorthodox sexual practices was thought to have somehow contributed to the tragedy.” Where Polanski’s work is concerned, the effect Tate’s murder had on her husband is all too apparent. Polanski himself has described Tate’s death as “his worst and most prolonged blow,” and his resulting anger and despair is apparent in even his most recent work. By 1978, Polanski had retreated from the lurid spotlight of the tabloid media and experienced success with films like ChinatownandThe Tenant. He had also finally begun to shake the erroneous reputation for being involved with Satanists and drug addicts that was one of the after-effects of the Tate massacre. Just when he was beginning to get back in the public’s good graces, the director, who had a life-long appetite for the company of young women, was involved in an ambiguous affair that led to arrest, accusations of rape and a subsequent trial. The circumstances, though a bit unclear to this day, revolved around Polanski’s conduct with a 13-year-old girl. Needless to say, the media went nuts, and put Polanski, who loathed the negative attention, back on the news and in the tabloids. On the eve of the trial, at which Polanski was to plead guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, he fled to France, where he remains. Since the episode, Polanski’s work has slowed down considerably, the notable exception being the aforementioned The Pianist and the media coverage, which he so reviled, has all but disappeared. However, in recent months Polanski has been back in the news, as a result of an HBO documentary. The doc, titled Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, premiered at Sundance in 2008, and hit living rooms later in the year. The focus of the film was the 1978 trial that led to the director’s self-exile. What has forced Polanski back into the spotlight is that the film presents new testimony from witnesses that could potentially clear the director’s name. Just when it seemed that Polanski had disappeared into obscurity, he is back at the center of a scandal. Polanski’s cross to bear, through all his personal misfortune, was the attention he got from the media. His life has been comprised of a string of events so outlandish, that they are at times difficult to believe. On the set of one of his early movies, Polanski was quoted as saying “the more fantastic you are, the more real you become.” As Sanford points out, “it was a quip that seemed to apply as much to Polanski himself as his work.” ES
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