Review of Roman Polanski’s film “The Palace”

Roman Polanski’s “The Palace”, spat upon by progressive critics at the Venice Festival, unexpectedly broke through into the chaste Russian box office, where the main censorship note in the film was Vladimir Putin’s speech on the eve of the year 2000. I received further confirmation that you cannot escape from the paradoxes of fate Andrey Plakhov.

Polanski, far from being a coward, ran all his life. A Jewish teenager hid from the Nazis in Polish villages under a false name. The best student of the Lodz Film School fled from communist ideology to the West. Then from the European radical left to America, already being a recognized director. From there – from American justice and mental illness – back to Europe.

In 2009, Polanski came to the Zurich Film Festival to receive an award for his contribution to cinema, but was arrested at the request of the United States and spent seven months in prison. Of these, four are under house arrest in Gstaad, a ski resort also known for its luxury hotel Le Palace. Released by the Swiss authorities, the director went home to Paris to soon experience another attack – this time from feminists who had usurped public opinion. And more than ten years later he returned to Gstaad to film “The Palace” here.

The film’s first big scene is its best. In one continuous shot, the hotel, run by an efficient manager (Oliver Masucci), prepares to welcome distinguished guests arriving for the millennium, and therefore to satisfy their wildest whims for a good tip. Polanski is the god of cinematic space, its creation and maximum creative use: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Lodger are irrefutable examples of this. Here, instead of one apartment, there is a whole palace, there is room to spread out.

In fact, in order not to run the risk of another arrest, the director did not have to leave France: it is not difficult to find a similar VIP hotel on the Cote d’Azur. But Le Palace, this fabulous multi-storey chalet high in the mountains, is seductive not only because it has featured Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson. The most piquant moment in the biography of the legendary hotel is that during the Second World War its basement was used by the Swiss Banking Corporation to store valuables, and among them, as is well known, were the gold of the Third Reich, and dirty Nazi money, and those belonged to persecuted and murdered Jews.

Therefore, when in such a “praying place” at the end of 1999, the “masters of life” and the “cream of society” gather to pour alcohol on the “end of the world,” there is no particular doubt about the purity of the wealth acquired by this clientele. The dying Texas billionaire Arthur William Dallas III (Monty Python comedian John Cleese) celebrates the first anniversary of his marriage to a young chick of immense thickness and orders her a live penguin as a gift. The penguin is alive, but the customer will be able to meet the millennium in the form of, yes, a walking corpse. The chic old woman Marquise (Fanny Ardant) seduces a young plumber and feeds black caviar to a Chihuahua dog, whose excrement stinks the entire exclusive hotel. A company of retired former beauties parade through its bars and corridors – victims of the plastic executioner-surgeon present here; one of the victims is played by Sidney Rohm, who in her youth starred in Polanski’s film “What?”

The word “former” is key here, and its living embodiment is the former handsome Mickey Rourke in the image of a rogue financier in a straw wig a la Donald Trump. There is also a former star porn actor (Luca Barbareschi), and a whole kaleidoscope of grotesque characters from the era of hedonism, easy sex and easy money. An era that began in the 1980s and lasted until the end of the century, to collapse along with the Twin Towers in 2001 and slowly continue down an inclined plane until the present day, as if mocking Francis Fukuyama’s blunder about the “end of history.”

But Polanski doesn’t do apocalyptic stuff; Together with his co-writer Jerzy Skolimowski (their joint film Knife in the Water launched both of their international careers), he performs in the hooligan genre of bawdy anecdote, colored with particularly caustic Polish humor. This bilious humor, turning into dark sarcasm, we observed, of course, both in “Ball of the Vampires” and in “Rosemary’s Baby”, but there it was camouflaged with mysticism, while in “The Palace” it appears in its crystal clear form.

Polanski was always partial to the “historical enemies” of his homeland and once, before my eyes, he accepted an old saber as a gift from the Cossacks, which may have once been used to cut off Polish heads. So it didn’t surprise me how knowledgeably and even with a certain sincerity he unfolds the Russian plot in the film. Straight out of the “roaring nineties,” a team of Slavic guys, led by a dangerously charming bandit (Alexander Petrov), bursts into the hotel. They demand a safe to store the many Louis Vuitton suitcases they brought with them, stuffed with foreign currency, for which, after some hesitation, they are given a dark room in that same historical basement. Accompanied by long-legged and empty-headed models, the envoys of Russian democracy listen to the New Year’s speech of the retiring Yeltsin, then the incoming Putin, while experiencing difficult, mixed feelings. The plot ends with the appearance of a gloomy Russian ambassador (Ilya Volokh), who, like a boy, shares the contents of suitcases with the guests while his wife gets drunk at the banquet and falls face-first into a plate.

These scenes in the domestic theatrical version are also censored, but in vain. Polanski laughs not only at post-perestroika Russia, but above all at himself, seeming to deliberately lower the level of satire below the plinth. In the finale, however, he allows himself one more downward movement, so that no one has any doubts about his intentions to go to the very end. Here the fauna involved in the film will come in handy – a sexually anxious Chihuahua who has eaten too much caviar, and an overly timid penguin, ready for anything.

Polanski’s previous film, An Officer and a Spy, was a noble rebuke to slanderers who accused the director of all his mortal sins. “The Palace” is devoid of any respectability: it is a savory slap in the face of the same accusers. Why, many ask, did Polanski make his probably last film in the format of a primitive cartoon? Why, when leaving, did he slam the door and make an offensive, indecent sound? Yes, simply in spite of stupid enemies and enemies – after all, this has always been the principle of his life, the driving force in the duel with fate. And who said that this film is the last? The ninety-year-old hooligan is still making films, albeit no longer great, but evil and malicious. And it’s clear that he enjoys it. Has the right to.