Is it all over for Roman Polanski?

WE HAVE neither the space (nor the moral confidence) to deliver a definitive judgment on whether the Swiss coppers were right to bang up Roman Polanski last week, writes DONALD CLARKE

You’ve heard the arguments already. Nobody contests the assertion that, 32 years ago, the director had sex with a 13-year-old girl in Jack Nicholson’s Hollywood home. After his arrest, when his lawyer realised the authorities seemed unlikely to honour a plea bargain, Polanski fled the US for life as a celebrated émigré in France.

Does it matter that the victim no longer wishes the case to be pursued? What do we make of the queasy suggestion – particularly prevalent in French circles – that the ability to produce masterpieces absolves an artist of any moral responsibility? Is it fair to regard Polanski’s tragic personal history as a mitigating factor in the original offence? There’s too much to be discussed on each of those unanswerable questions.

We are on somewhat more secure ground when we move to ponder what effect the original arrest and subsequent exile have had on Polanski’s career. Accept, first, that Roman Polanski is a film-maker of genius. A graduate of the Polish National Film School in Lódz, he began his career – first at home, later in Hollywood – by delivering a run of masterpieces that, in quality and resonance, have been equalled only by the likes of Ingmar Bergman or Alfred Hitchcock.

Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown:any of those films could have assured the director's place at the top table. Even his supposed early failures (the peculiar comedy The Fearless Vampire Killersand the existential farce What?) are imbued with a sense of casual unease and steadfast pessimism that are entirely Polanksi's own.

Yet, right from the beginning of his career, the director’s awful life story loomed over critical assessments of his work. Born in Paris, Roman Polanski, a Polish Jew, moved back to Krakow with his family three years before the Nazis crossed the border. He somehow managed to escape the ghetto, but his mother and sister were murdered in Auschwitz and his father barely survived the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.

The compulsion to look at key films such as Repulsion(Catherine Deneuve goes crazy in South Kensington) and Rosemary's Baby(Mia Farrow is raped by the devil in New York) and discover traces of the director's grim early life may seem facile and reductive. On the other hand, it would take an odd fellow – odder even than Roman Polanski – to get through a career without allowing those experiences to leak into the work.

Amateur psychologists were given even more to work with when, in 1969, Charles Manson, the rotting zombie who prowled the mass grave of hippiedom, and his gang of hopped-up idiots broke into Polanski’s house and murdered his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, and four other guests.

His first film after the murders, a version of Macbeth, is just about the most gory, hopeless version of a Shakespeare play ever put on celluloid. Where can that have come from? When Polanski made Chinatown, an imperishable slab of late noir, he stomped his foot until Robert Towne's happy ending was darkened up to his grim satisfaction.

By 1977, when the grisly crime happened, Polanski, though barely in middle age, could be regarded as a walking repository of the West’s recent great miseries. An escapee of the Holocaust, he had been raised in the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War, before drifting to the US and experiencing the sourest, most poisonous effusions of the over-romanticised hippie era. Now, he was among (though surely not quite of) the chemically enhanced hedonists who occupied the wealthier parts of California during the vulgar 1970s.

Then, truth be told, Polanski and the zeitgeist parted ways. When he moved to France, he somehow failed to turn himself back into a European director. Instead, working in countries that had not got around to arranging extradition treaties with the United States, he became the maker of superior but always slightly uncomfortable Europuddings. The term was coined to describe co-productions between various nations, which, as a result of their mongrel financing, never seem quite sure of their identities.

Polanski has, to be sure, made good films since fleeing Los Angeles, and those works have continued to mine his gruesome past. Tess, his adaption of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, dealt with a young girl who is led astray by an older cad (ahem?). The Pianist,for which he won an Oscar in 2003, engaged directly with his experiences during the war. These are prestige, worthy projects, but they have none of the evil energy that clogged up masterpieces such as Repulsionand Chinatown.

Maybe, as his near contemporary Francis Ford Coppola would eventually do, Polanski simply ran out of creative steam. After all, there aren’t many directors who manage to stay both innovative and dangerous – Sam Fuller? Werner Herzog? – into their Werther’s Original years. It is, however, hard to escape the conclusion that living cosily in Europe, away from the cut, thrust and backstabbing, softened Polanski and deprived him of a useful amount of malign vigour.

What next? If he does end up serving time in the US, Polanski – now 76 – is unlikely to shoot another film. If the great survivor somehow bounds free once more then, granted an umpteenth life, he may undergo some sort of psychic reupholstery.

Either way, we will get to see at least one more Roman Polanski film. At the time of his arrest, he was engaged in post-production on an adaption of Robert Harris's The Ghost, a roman à clefconcerning someone very like Tony Blair starring Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor.

If Terry Gilliam can shake off the death of his lead actor, Heath Ledger, and finish The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, then the folk behind The Ghostcan knock their footage into a serviceable print. After all, they've just got themselves a million dollars' worth of free publicity. Nobody ever suggested the movie industry wasn't run by cynics.