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- Courtesy LA Times Collection, UCLA Library Department of Special Collections
Like Gonzo, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired is an opportunity for people to write about the subject while glossing over the documentary. The subject is the trial of everyone’s beloved movie-movie director of Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby and The Pianist for “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old. The documentary spotlights the miscarriages of justice, attested to by defense and prosecution, that a loose-cannon judge inflicted.
The miscellaneous Polanskiana that pads the chronicle is neat and all, but, frankly, it’s weird watching the film make a victim of the director (who preemptively deported himself to France mid-trial). Nor does Zenovich grapple with the mindfuck facing anyone struggling to parse the tangle of human events in the following sentence: great filmmaker Roman Polanski, a Holocaust survivor widowed by Charles Manson, likes “young women.” And for scandal-seekers, Wanted and Desired isn’t half as illuminating as a trip through the trial’s file at The Smoking Gun.
Opens July 11.
The miscellaneous Polanskiana that pads the chronicle is neat and all, but, frankly, it’s weird watching the film make a victim of the director (who preemptively deported himself to France mid-trial). Nor does Zenovich grapple with the mindfuck facing anyone struggling to parse the tangle of human events in the following sentence: great filmmaker Roman Polanski, a Holocaust survivor widowed by Charles Manson, likes “young women.” And for scandal-seekers, Wanted and Desired isn’t half as illuminating as a trip through the trial’s file at The Smoking Gun.
Opens July 11.
