An Officer and a Spy

Adapted by Robert Harris from his own novel, Polanski's account of the Dreyfus affair won the Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI award at Venice in 2019 and drew twelve César nominations. Its reception was inseparable from the director: the jury president Lucrecia Martel publicly distanced herself at the festival, French women's groups protested the nominations, and a number of critics declined to separate the film's subject — a man wrongly accused — from the circumstances of the man who made it. That argument is legitimate and is not resolved by the film's quality.

The film itself is a procedural, and an unusually cold one. Jean Dujardin plays Georges Picquart, an ambitious officer with the standard antisemitism of his class and service, who takes over the intelligence section and finds, essentially by doing his job properly, that the handwriting on the document convicting Dreyfus belongs to somebody else. What follows is bureaucratic: files, transfers, a posting to Tunisia, a duel, a libel trial. Paweł Edelman shot it in muted institutional greys.

As a study of how an institution defends a lie once it has committed to one, it is exceptionally lucid, and Dujardin's Picquart is deliberately unlikeable — a man who does the right thing without ever becoming a good one. Harris's screenplay is a model of compression for a case that filled twelve years and several volumes.