Arts FA Entertainment Case Reopened Polanski documentary at Detroit Film Theatre revisits 1970s scandal, legal travails. Michael Fox Special to the Jewish News R oman Polanski's life is the stuff that nightmares, and dreams, are made of. Only an extraordinary person could have weathered the traumas he endured, and only a remarkable artist could have transmuted this suffering into brilliant films such as Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist. Marina Z,enovich's riveting documentary Roman Polanski; Wanted and Desired, revisits the 1977 sex scandal and legal perversions that ultimately impelled the charismatic Jewish director to flee Los Angeles for Paris. Still subject to arrest, he's never returned to the States. (The Oscar he won for directing The Pianist in 2002 was presumably deliv- ered to him in Europe.) Roman Polanski; Wanted and Desired depicts the unholy intersection of celebrity, sex, mass media and justice with uncom- mon rigor and intelligence. The film, which screens at the Detroit Film Theatre in the Detroit Institute of Arts Sept. 25-27, down- plays the most sensationalist aspects of the case in favor of the deeper currents of char- acter and ego. In 1968, with the box-office and critical success of Rosemary's Baby, Polanski was the hottest director in the world. He also was happily married to the gorgeous actress Sharon Tate and had seemingly escaped, once and for all, the shadow of his tormented childhood in Poland. Polanski's parents were deported by the Nazis, and his mother died in a concentra- tion camp. Roman was reunited with his father in 1945, but the lad had to survive the war years largely by his own wits. Indeed, his childhood is mentioned sever- al times by friends in the course of the docu- mentary. It isn't offered as a defense for his crime but to suggest that, for all his charm and sophistication, Polanski is scarred. Tate's murder at the hands of Charles Manson's followers in 1969, while Polanski was in London, was an unimaginably dev- astating blow. Adding grievous insult to hei- nous injury, tabloid and serious publications alike ran slimy rumors and allegations. The press even hinted that Polanski had somehow invited this hell on himself as the director of frightening films about the cor- ruption of innocence. In hindsight, it appears that the media establishment mounted a vengeful terror campaign against the advocates and partici- pants of the era's sexual revolution. The Tate killing, the papers suggested, was a warning that depravity and death were the inevitable consequences of pleasure. (As an aside, we might consider the initial media coverage of the AIDS epidemic from the same perspective.) In the years following the pregnant Tate's death, Polanski built a reputation in L.A. as a womanizer. Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson likewise cut a swath through Hollywood, but their public images weren't shaded with death and darkness. Then Polanski turned a 1977 photography session with a 13-year-old — arranged by her mother to launch the girl's modeling and acting career — into a sexual encounter. She told her mother; her mother went to the police; and Polanski was arrested. Polanski's actions are indefensible, even if it was seduction rather than rape. He pled guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and, following a court-appointed psychiatrist's determination that he was not a threat as a sex offender, was on course to receive probation. That's when it began to get weird, as the judge crossed one line after another. The admirably focused Wanted and Desired omits peripheral observers, experts and pundits and sticks to participants and direct witnesses. Only the publicity- conscious Judge Laurence J. Rittenband (who died in 1993) and Polanski, who told Zenovich his participation would likely be perceived as self-promotion, aren't inter- viewed. But we get plenty of the sexy, self-pos- sessed and super-smart Polanski in archival news footage and TV interviews, and he is as compelling and complex a personality as will grace screens this year. No one would place Polanski's travails with the justice system on par with the Dreyfus Affair that plagued France at the turn of the 20th century; but after all he'd been through in his life, Polanski must have felt persecuted. A scene from the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, an eye- opening discourse on the nature of celebrity in America Roman Polanski; Wanted and Desired will be shown 7 p.m. Thursday and 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25-27, at the Detroit Film Theatre in the Detroit Institute of Arts, located at 5200 Woodward Ave., in Detroit. Tickets are $6.50-$7.50. 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