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Review: ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED / Marina Zenovich (2008)

August 24th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Photo Credit: LA Times Collection, UCLA Library Department of Special Collections

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008)
Directed by: Marina Zenovich
Written by: Joe Bini, Peter G. Morgan and Marina Zenovich
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Running Time: 99 min.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Since when does being a Holocaust survivor excuse one from raping an underage girl? That, and a publicity hungry judge eager to be a celebrity by association appear to be director Marina Zenovich’s prime arguments in her documentary defense of director Roman Polanski. They’re not enough.

In 1977, Polanski was hired to photograph young girls for Vogue magazine. (That’s like giving John Gacy a clown suit, a length of rope and a Cub Scout.) He brought his subject/victim, a 13-year-old girl named Samantha Gailey, to Jack Nicholson’s house (Jack was out of town), got her naked in a jacuzzi, plied her with champagne and Quaaludes and proceeded to “consensually” rape her. Ms. Gailey has since publicly forgiven Mr. Polanski.

According to Det. Phil Vannatter, the upstanding law enforcement agent who tried his best to keep O.J. behind bars, “(Polanski) did not perceive having intercourse with a 13-year-old girl as against the law. That was not in his culture, you know. It was a ’so what’ type of thing.”

On March 11, 1977 the film director was arrested for rape by use of drugs. Eleven months later, citing Judge Laurence J. Rittenband’s incompetence, Polanski fled to Paris and hasn’t set foot on American soil since, not even to pick up his best director Oscar for The Pianist. Admittedly, Rittenband is a piece of work. The tough sentencing senior judge loved celebrity trials and the limelight it afforded him. He ordered his bailiff to keep a scrapbook of his star-studded encounters. Rittenband even went so far as to solicit reservations from the media for a seat in his courtroom.

The lawyers that argued the case, Douglas Dalton for the defense and prosecuting attorney Roger Gunson, are given too much screen time. Dalton, still defending his ex-client, states, “People have the right to their own opinion, but they don’t have the right to their own facts.” Richard Brenneman, former writer for The Santa Monica Evening Outlook remembers a nasty joke that circulated at the time of the trial: The only reason Gunson was selected was “because he was a Mormon and the only member of the D.A.’s office that hadn’t had sex with an underage girl.” There comes a point in the film where the haggard Dalton and the still youthful Gunson alternate so many talking head close-ups, it looks like a dialog between Royal Dano and Phil Donahue.

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