Films No One Needs
By 
Bill Cosby may be in jail. Harvey Weinstein may be in hiding. But Roman Polanski is alive and well, and planning his first movie in the #MeToo era. He even has an Oscar-winning actor attached.
French producers Légende Films confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that Polanski will begin filming his next movie, the political thriller J’Accuse, this fall in Paris. Louis Garrel will star as Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the real-life French-Jewish soldier wrongly accused of spying for the Germans in the 1890s. The scandal, which divided the country, concluded dramatically in 1906 when Dreyfus was exonerated after spending five years in the Devil’s Island penal colony for high treason. The Artist’s Academy Award–winning actor Jean Dujardin will star as the counter-espionage officer who vindicated Dreyfus. Mathieu Amalric, Olivier Gourmet, and Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner will round out the cast. Polanski has been developing the film for the past six years, with a script from British novelist Robert Harris.
The subject matter—a man being wrongly accused and proving his innocence decades later—will likely make for interesting press conversations conducted around the time of the film’s eventual release. Polanski is currently evading sentencing in the U.S. after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor—then-13-year-old Samantha Geimer—in 1977. In spite of the plea, Polanski has maintained a successful movie career—even winning a best-director Oscar for The Pianist in 2003.
None of this is going to stop me from an annual viewing of Chinatown, but for god’s sake, no no no no no no. No one needs Polanski framing his own child rape through Alfred Dreyfus. I don’t care how good of a director he is, this is grotesque and embarrassing. Largely I’m outraged htat someone is evidently funding it and that great French actors are starring in it. But hey, at least Polanski has learned something over the decades:
This past May, Polanski described the #MeToo movement as another instance of “mass hysteria that occurs in society from time to time. Sometimes it’s very dramatic, like the French Revolution or the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France, or sometimes it’s less bloody, like 1968 in Poland or McCarthyism in the U.S.”
“Everyone is trying to back this movement, mainly out of fear,” said Polanski. “I think it’s total hypocrisy.”
I guess Brett Kavanaugh has a character witness if he needs one.