The Palace lights up the darkness.
Roman Polanski’s latest movie, The Palace, is hard to take. That’s why it may be the essential satire of this period. In a scabrous, outré attack, Polanski caricatures the ruling class so mercilessly that their humanity is almost unrecognizable, but then, it’s too recognizable. Perhaps. Polanski depicts them as monsters, which is never how our corrupt media cover the power elite at such congregations as the World Economic Forum. All the more reason to appreciate Polanski’s self-destructive daring.
Set in 1999 at the safely distant moment of Y2K panic, The Palace follows aristocrats, celebrities, politicians, and sycophants at their self-indulgent gathering in the most luxurious hotel in Gstaad, Switzerland. Our guide is Hansueli (Oliver Masucci), an unflappable middle-aged hotelier who assures every guest of his confidentiality as he caters to each one’s wildest whims. He’s like the MC in Cabaret, carefully keeping his distance from their corruption while Polanski and cinematographer Pawel Edelman flash a dazzling yet harsh bright light. Part of this film’s shock is that it reflects the world’s destruction by politicians, celebrities, and media-brokers as it happens before our eyes.
Polanski won his Best Director Oscar for the 2002 Holocaust drama The Pianist, recently revived at New York’s Film Forum. But The Palace has yet to secure American distribution, since Polanski has been internationally cancelled. The Palace premiered last fall at the Venice Film Festival and is now being circulated unofficially — like samizdat. In the climate of this fatuous awards season, TV’s scripted J6 reality show, and the shameless confusion of “disinformation” and “misinformation,” The Palace’s critique may be seen only secretly, in the same way that censored and underground publications were reproduced and distributed in the Eastern Bloc among dissidents in the era of Soviet government suppression. (This circumstance is analogous to Big Tech censorship of the news with skittish film-circuit gatekeepers joining in.) The most famous example of samizdat was Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago, which David Lean eventually filmed in 1965.
But Polanski’s movie is anti-romantic. His original story (co-written with his Polish film-school colleague Jerzy Skolimowski) takes aim at the social and political circus that has become mundane. The Y2K premise may keep Polanski from being sued for defamation (the new political fad), but the resemblance to Millennial catastrophe is undeniable. Polanski’s cool vengeance recalls Woody Allen letting it rip in Deconstructing Harry after his first media scandals.
Watching The Palace gives us Daumier goggles. Famous actors from Mickey Rourke and Fanny Ardant to John Cleese and Joaquim de Almeida wear the eccentricity of their characters like botched nip-tuck jobs, acting out vanity, wantonness, criminality, and greed. The primarily European cast is a convocation of aliens, not unlike those untrustworthy grip-and-grin photo ops that American celebs take with Zelensky. Several embezzlement scenarios intersect, including comic revelations of sexual perversities — humans and pets cross the Rubicon. Every scene in The Palace tells a “What fresh hell is this?” joke.
Polanski’s viewpoint is so controlled, there’s no rage in his apparent misanthropy. The balance of scoffing and condemnation shows grievance by a worldly but far-from-innocent man. It evokes that moment when Angel Clare (Peter Firth) in Polanski’s Tess (from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles) scolds his non-virginal bride (Nastassja Kinski), “I thought you were a child of nature, but you are the last in a line of decadent aristocrats.” The Palace visualizes Polanski’s disillusionment. He’s made horror films before, but this one rebukes the hypocrisies of social progressives and the whole damned better-than-thou global elite.
Venice International Film Festival chairman Alberta Barbera had to defend his decision to include The Palace against objections from liberal fascists: “I don’t understand why one cannot distinguish between the responsibilities of the man and those of the artist. Polanski is 90 years old, he is one of the few working masters, he made an extraordinary film. It may be the last film of his career.” The Palace is certainly a more focused film than those quasi-political white elephants Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer even when its vision is off-putting. It’s “designed to rub our noses in its presupposed comic turpitude,” observed critic Dennis Delrogh. So the message gets passed around in secret like The Black Album by Prince. We are currently in the dark age of information and self-expression, but Polanski lights a flagrant, glaring torch.