After a very brief theatrical run, Marina Zenovich's documentary on the infamous Roman Polanski statutory rape case, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired -- which resulted in his 30-year exile from the United States -- makes its cable debut this week, and far from simply rehashing the facts of the past, it has cast severe doubt on what most people think they know. It's even brought up a fresh new wrinkle in the case, which is already causing a war of words between people on all sides of the event.
Cinematical covers the new twist (in an article with the yawn-inducing headline "Roman Polanski Doc Still in Dispute"). When Wanted and Desired tipped Monday night on HBO, it wasn't the same version that filmgoers in New York and Los Angeles saw during its limited big-screen run; the film's producers, under pressure from the Los Angeles County Superior Court, deleted a portion of the documentary in which it is claimed that in 1997, a judge newly assigned to the case offered to drop the charges against Polanski and allow him to return to the U.S., on the condition that the hearing be televised. Polanski refused, and spent ten more years in exile.
What's most astonishing about the claim isn't that court officials denied it and pushed the filmmakers into dropping the scene; it's that attorneys on both sides of the case -- both the defense and the prosecution -- say the documentary is correct and that L.A. County is lying. In a joint statement -- the first issued in the history of the case by both defense and prosecuting attorneys -- they claim that "Monday's false and reprehensible statement by the Los Angeles Superior Court continues their inappropriate handling of the Polanski case."
In the Washington Post, William Booth interviews Zenovich and examines the film in some depth, finding that the director attempts to show how celebrity and greed conspired to botch and misdeal the case against Polanski while never exculpating the director or forgetting the victim. Whatever the ultimate outcome of a situation in which no one emerges looking particularly good, Polanski himself maintains the same distance he always has: he refused to attend a screening of Wanted and Desired, and, given a DVD of the documentary, asked only what Zenovich's next film project might be.
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