There are three things I have wanted to watch for the last seven years:
- Roman Polanski’s last two films, An Officer and a Spy (2019) and The Palace (2023), and
- The Tencent Chinese series covering the next part of Cixin Liu‘s Three-Body Problem – now tentatively titled Dark Forest and presumably arriving in 2029.
I check on the Tencent production every two months or so, when I have an idle minute, or it crosses my mind.
Missing out on the Polanski films, though, which millions in Europe and elsewhere have seen, is an intellectual annoyance of the wasteland the USA has become.
They aren’t streaming anywhere. They aren’t on Criterion yet. Nobody demands them. It’s maddening.
I get comic books made into massive SFX and CG-driven eye candy 24/7/365, but if I”m out of town for the two weeks the latest Polanski film played in the one art house theater in my area, finding it becomes impossible for years.
I own The Ghost Writer (2010) – insomuch as I purchased it from Prime and can watch it at will, and do, often.
The screenplay is by Polanski and Robert Harris, who wrote the novel, The Ghost (2007). But it is not easy to get a copy of the screenplay, which is a true collaboration between the two friends.
The film is, in a word, delicious.
The set-up scene for the film reminds me of the opening of a Kawabata novel. The score has this insistent, beautifully puzzling, repeated oboe melody that is born as we are shown an empty car on a ferry and a body washed up on the shore.
In a pre-meeting lunch mid-conversation between a writer and his agent, it’s made clear the meeting is to hire the replacement for the man who has died. Drowned. High blood alcohol content. Presumably fell off the ferry.
The exposition continues through building security, walking and talking up the elevator with the editor, who is immediately hostile to hiring the writer.
And it culminates in the meeting with the publisher to discuss hiring him to be the ghost writer for the former Prime Minister of the UK.
The scene is so deftly expository, the viewer feels immediately as if they are in the hands of a master of film making.
The meeting scene is cast perfectly, exquisitely.
Ewan MacGregor is the writer, Jon Bernthal his agent. Playwright and actor Tim Preece is the perfect foil as the editor, Roy.
Timothy Hutton plays Sydney Kroll, the corporate attorney, who keeps the meeting and the exposition to a crisp minimum, basically invisibly, even as he hands the writer an unrelated manuscript as an aside. Jim Belushi is great as the American publisher.
The dialogue is sharp, pointed – brilliant as written and exceptionally delivered.
Polanski is so good. What a complete film maker. Um maestro. All I want is to see his last two films. Sigh.
