Berlinale 2010 - Los premios (Clarín)

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"The Ghost Writer", de Roman Polanski (críticas)

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Manohla Dargis

The darkly brooding sky that hangs over much of “The Ghost Writer,” the latest from Roman Polanski, suggests that all is grim and gray and perhaps even for naught. But this high-grade pulp entertainment is too delectably amusing and self-amused, and far too aware of its own outrageous conceits to sustain such a dolorous verdict. The world has gone mad of course — this is a Polanski film — so all we can do is puzzle through the madness, dodging the traps with our ironic detachment and tongue lightly in cheek.

The Ghost of the title, never named in the film, is played by Ewan McGregor at his ingénue best. A writer for hire — his oeuvre is summed up by the vulgar wit of his latest effort, about a magician, “I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered” — the Ghost is tapped for cleanup duties. The initial ghostwriter behind the unfinished memoirs of a former British prime minister, Adam Lang (a superb Pierce Brosnan), has washed up dead on an American beach. The publisher wants a completed book and presumptive best seller, and Lang, an increasingly divisive figure at home and abroad, needs the kind of tidying up that such a media event might provide. The Ghost, an agreeable, convenient blank slate (no family, no history), seems the man for the job.

And what nasty work it proves to be! Based on the novel “The Ghost” by Robert Harris, who shares screenwriting credit with Mr. Polanski, the film opens under a menacing cloak of darkness that rarely rises. An abandoned car in the first shot leads to the first ghostwriter’s beached body being lashed by ocean waters in Martha’s Vineyard, a macabre setup that in turn leads to the Ghost receiving a thrashing in London, as he’s insulted (by an editor who thinks he’s wrong for the job); bullied (by the publisher who wants a fast turnaround); and punched (by a mugger who snatches a manuscript, mistaking it for Lang’s). By the time the Ghost meets Lang, who’s holed up at Martha’s Vineyard, he is as jumpy as the rest of us. (The film was largely shot in Germany.)

Mr. Polanski is a master of menace and, working with a striking wintry palette that at times veers into the near-monochromatic — the blacks are strong and inky, the churning ocean the color of lead — he creates a wholly believable world rich in strange contradictions and ominous implications. Among the most initially confusing is Lang, a professional charmer whose beaming smiles, with their sinister undercurrent, and fits of rage convey depths that the Ghost soon begins to plumb, an endeavor that takes the shape of an investigation. This amateur sleuthing leads to unsurprising trouble, including with Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), a brainy beauty whose relationship with her husband holds its own secrets and is transparently meant to invoke that between Cherie Booth and Tony Blair.

The parallels with Mr. Blair and Lang spice up the story, especially as references to Iraq, torture and the Central Intelligence Agency are folded into the mix and placard-waving protesters gather outside Lang’s hideaway. Fingers are pointed, though sometimes it seems not only at Lang but also at Mr. Polanski, who is under house arrest in Switzerland awaiting word on whether he will be sent back to Los Angeles to face sentencing for having had sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Certainly the shots of Lang’s detractors, with their furiously distorted faces and accusatory placards (“guilty,” “wanted”), gives the film an extra-cinematic tang, though as with so much here, it’s also evident that Mr. Polanski is having his fun.

And he’s delivering this pulpy fun at such a high level that “The Ghost Writer” is irresistible, no matter how obvious the twists. Everything — including Alexandre Desplat’s score, with its mocking, light notes and urgent rhythms suggestive of Bernard Herrmann — works to sustain a mood, establish an atmosphere and confirm an authorial intelligence that distinguishes this film from the chaff. Unlike many modern Hollywood and Hollywood-style thrillers, which seek to wrest tension from a frenzy of cutting and a confusion of camera angles, Mr. Polanski creates suspense inside the frame through dynamic angles and through the discrete, choreographed movements of the camera and actors. He makes especially effective use of the enormous windows in Lang’s house through which the sky and ocean beckon and threaten.

It’s easy to speculate that Mr. Polanski was attracted to the theme of rewriting one’s life history. Reading a work of art through the lens of biography is seductive, particularly when an artist ventures into the explicitly personal, as he did in “The Pianist,” his 2002 film about a musician who, like him, survived the Holocaust. But such interpretations can flatten poetry into prose and also serve as strategies to neuter artists, whose works of imagination are “revealed” as nothing more than banal facts. This isn’t to deny the personal in art, only an insistence on the elusiveness of creation. Mr. Polanski’s ventures into the horrific in films like “Repulsion” might have something to do with his history, but they are also a matter of affinities, inspirations, attitudes, competencies, tastes, pleasures.

In this respect “The Ghost Writer” seems to be as much about Mr. Polanski’s life as, well, that of Tony Blair, which only means that there are amusing points of convergence. Tracing the lines between fact and fiction makes for a dandy parlor game, one that Mr. Polanski obviously wants us to play, at least for a while, because such resonances have their rewards. They thicken the texture of the work, even if they don’t define it. Such thickening might seem especially critical with material as thin as “The Ghost Writer,” but these are the tools of a director working with every element at his disposal, including a colorful miscellany of emoting, popping, memorable faces (notably those of Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkinson, Eli Wallach and David Rintoul).

It would be easy to overstate the appeal of “The Ghost Writer” just as, I imagine, it will be easy for some to dismiss it. But the pleasures of a well-directed movie should never be underestimated. The image of Mr. Brosnan abruptly leaning toward the camera like a man possessed is worth a dozen Oscar-nominated performances. And the way, when Lang chats with the Ghost — his arms and legs open, a drink in hand, as if he were hitting on a woman — shows how an actor and his director can sum up an entire personality with a single pose. Mr. Polanski’s work with his performers is consistently subtle even when the performances seem anything but, which is true of this very fine film from welcome start to finish.

“The Ghost Writer” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Adult words and deeds.

THE GHOST WRITER

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Roman Polanski; written by Mr. Polanski and Robert Harris, based on the novel by Mr. Harris; director of photography, Pawel Edelman; edited by Herve de Luze; production designer, Albrecht Konrad; music by Alexandre Desplat; produced by Mr. Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde and Timothy Burrill; released by Summit Entertainment. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Ewan McGregor (the Ghost), Kim Cattrall (Amelia Bly), Olivia Williams (Ruth Lang), Pierce Brosnan (Adam Lang), Timothy Hutton (Sidney Kroll), Tom Wilkinson (Paul Emmett), Robert Pugh (Richard Rycart), James Belushi (John Maddox), David Rintoul (Stranger) and Eli Wallach (Old Man).

VILLAGE VOICE By Nicolas Rapold

It's hard not to picture Polanski under house arrest in Gstaad editing his diverting new thriller, in which a former British prime minister dodges extradition while having his memoirs rewritten. Then again, when your life is like a mash-up of the History Channel's entire catalog of shock programming, autobiography will probably influence your fictions, and Polanski seems inspired as he maintains implausible momentum with a cloudy premise. Ewan McGregor diffidently plays the so-called ghost to exiled politician Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), living in cushioned seclusion off the gray New England coast. The writer is hacking through the bombast left by his (dead) predecessor when Lang's past war-on-terrorism overstepping raises Blair-style static. Saved by often delightfully bitchy British dialogue, the movie sees McGregor's (arbitrarily written) semi-naif stumbling onto conspiracies and dueling with Lang's wife and mistress (Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall, both sharp). What actually happens is less important than the barest glimmers of that old Polanski magic: ambient paranoia (aided by the Cul-de-Sac–y land's-end setting) and uneven power struggles (one involving a very crafty Tom Wilkinson as an old Lang associate). The wrap-up is one strange, ah-fuggit mess, on top of Google-powered plot moves, but Polanski's work therapy could have been a lot worse.

"The Ghost Writer" en la Berlinale (Clarín)

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En los links de la nota, recuadros y el resto de la info de las películas en competencia.

Polanski's Visions of Victimhood (The New York Times)

February 14, 2010
Polanski’s Visions of Victimhood
By DENNIS LIM

“THE GHOST WRITER,” the 18th feature by Roman Polanski, opens this week, and, not for the first time in Mr. Polanski’s career, the movie itself is likely to be overshadowed by the man who made it.

Critics and viewers have long been tempted to link Mr. Polanski’s work to his life — to view one through the prism of the other — not least because the life has been so public and so uncommonly eventful. “There’s nothing about human nature that would surprise him,” the novelist Robert Harris, a co-writer of “The Ghost Writer,” said recently. “He’s a sort of walking microcosm of history.”

As Mr. Harris suggests, Mr. Polanski’s biography could double as a summary of the 20th century. Born in 1933, he spent part of his boyhood scrambling to stay alive in the Krakow ghetto. He was reunited with his father after the war, but his mother died at Auschwitz. A precocious actor and street performer, he started plotting his escape from Communist Poland at a young age. His award-winning early films were his ticket out, and he arrived in London on the eve of the Swinging ’60s.

He made it to the United States in time for the summer of love, only to become a tragic symbol of the end of the ’60s, when his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, and four other people were slaughtered by followers of Charles Manson. The counterculture hangover continued; one might even say it never went away. In 1977 Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl. Last September, more than 31 years after he fled Los Angeles to escape sentencing, he was arrested in Zurich by Swiss authorities pending possible extradition to the United States.

While Mr. Polanski’s films are generally not self-revealing in any literal sense, he invites psychobiographical criticism because he has been, for almost his entire career, that relatively rare entity: a celebrity director. His persona is so much a part of the public imagination that it looms even over a movie as devoid of autobiographical echoes as “The Ghost Writer,” which had its premiere Friday at the Berlin International Film Festival and opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.

His filmography amounts to its own microcosm, cutting a swath through a half-century’s worth of cinematic trends. He came to prominence as part of the European art cinema of the ’60s: “Knife in the Water” (1962), his poised first feature about the triangle among a married couple and a young hitchhiker, earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. In America he directed “Chinatown,” one of the crowning achievements of Hollywood’s most recent golden age.

He has a taste for potboiling Grand Guignol (“The Ninth Gate”) but won an Oscar for his most restrained film, the Holocaust drama “The Pianist” (2002). A terminal outsider — “a fugitive all my life,” as he once put it — he has navigated the tricky logistics of international co-productions, especially since his banishment from Hollywood, making films that are often defined by displacement and rootlessness (“Frantic,” “Bitter Moon”).

Journalists and biographers reflexively scour Mr. Polanski’s life for clues to his art and vice versa. His “violent life and times,” Barbara Leaming argued in “Polanski: The Filmmaker as Voyeur” (1981), “form the subtext of his cinema.” Mr. Polanski is, to say the least, dismissive of this interpretive tack. In 2003 one question too many from Premiere magazine led him to cut short the interview: “Whatever happens to you changes the result of your work. Even sometimes trivial things. Now I must stop. I’ve had it.”

With a new film — and new circumstances in his life — the game of connect the dots continues. Based on “The Ghost,” a best-selling 2007 novel by Mr. Harris, “The Ghost Writer” unfolds from the point of view of a ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) hired to whip into shape the memoir of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), a Tony Blair-like American ally under investigation for war crimes. Watching this twisty thriller — which for long stretches finds Mr. McGregor’s character sequestered in a Martha’s Vineyard beach house in the dead of winter, another one of Mr. Polanski’s secluded heroes in another one of his restricted locations — it is hard not to note that the film was completed by its director while confined to his own chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. (He has been under house arrest since December.)

It’s also tempting to observe that Mr. Polanski used a ghostwriter (the journalist Edward Behr) for his 1984 autobiography, “Roman by Polanski.” “The Ghost Writer” is Mr. Polanski’s first post-exile film to be largely — and pointedly — set in the United States. Since he has not set foot on American soil in more than three decades, those dune-edged beaches are not, as we’re supposed to believe, in Massachusetts. Exteriors were shot on the German coast; the palatial vacation home was built on a Berlin soundstage.

But there is another way to see Mr. Polanski in his films, and that is through his authorial presence. More than half of his features are adapted from existing texts, but much of his work retains a striking unity of theme and mood. “His personality infiltrated it inevitably,” Mr. Harris said of the script for “The Ghost Writer,” which he wrote with Mr. Polanski.

The film gives us a quintessentially Polanskian me-against-the-world setup, in which an isolated protagonist succumbs to increasing paranoia. In Mr. Polanski’s movies paranoia can be a symptom of madness (“Repulsion”) or the only proof of sanity in a crazy world (“Rosemary’s Baby”). Sometimes it appears to be both, as in “The Tenant” (1976). In that film, both a black comedy about French xenophobia and a split-identity psychodrama, Mr. Polanski plays the title character, a Pole who rents an apartment in Paris and comes to suspect that his neighbors are conspiring to turn him into its previous resident, a woman who threw herself out of her window. Mr. McGregor’s unnamed character in “The Ghost Writer” is also haunted by his dead predecessor: the writer he’s replacing drowned under mysterious circumstances.

Mr. Polanski’s obsessions seem to have emerged fully formed. The series of short films he made in the late ’50s and early ’60s map out his universe in embryo. His first student film, “Murder,” stages in just over a minute a fatal stabbing by penknife: a killing without motive or context, rendered with startling detail and economy. Films like “Teeth Smile,” “Break Up the Dance” and “The Fat and the Lean” hint at the mind games and power plays to come.

From the start Mr. Polanski was a distinctive filmmaker with a penchant for extreme situations. The aura of violence and perversity that surrounded the films suited an enfant terrible who enjoyed notoriety. But the murder of his wife, besides shattering Mr. Polanski’s life, turned this convenient master narrative into a sick joke. Describing the carnage at his rented Benedict Canyon home, the Satan worship of “Rosemary’s Baby” fresh in their minds, journalists could not refrain from comparing it to a movie — specifically a Roman Polanski movie. “It was a scene as grisly as anything depicted in Polanski’s film explorations of the dark and melancholy corners of the human character,” Time magazine declared.

Roger Gunson, the prosecutor assigned to the statutory rape case, prepared for the trial that never happened by taking in a retrospective of his films. “Every Roman Polanski movie has a theme: corruption meeting innocence over water,” he says in Marina Zenovich’s 2008 documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” noting that Mr. Polanski had seduced his under-age quarry in a Jacuzzi.

As glib as such connections can seem, they are not always unfounded. Especially in times of distress Mr. Polanski has been drawn to material that might seem personally difficult. His first film after Ms. Tate’s death was an adaptation of “Macbeth” (1971), a blood-soaked tragedy that had many viewers fixating on the scene in which Macduff learns of the massacre of his family. Pauline Kael spoke for many critics when she wrote, “One sees the Manson murders in this ‘Macbeth’ because the director put them there.”

After leaving the United States, Mr. Polanski again turned his attention to a classic that suggested parallels with real-life circumstances. The young heroine of “Tess,” his adaptation of Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” is raped and cast out of society; the film starred the teenage Nastassja Kinski, who had reportedly been involved with Mr. Polanski since she was 15. Despite the provocative casting, some critics saw the film as an apology — Tess does avenge herself — and the sexual violence is shot with conspicuous, fog-shrouded discretion, in contrast to the lurid rape at the center of “Rosemary’s Baby.”

The central ambiguity of “Tess” — is the director identifying with Tess or her rapist or both? — gets at the complex notion of victimhood that runs through Mr. Polanski’s cinema, and through aspects of his biography, from Holocaust survivor to grief-stricken widower to accused rapist. There are plenty of victims and victimizers in his movies, but also plenty of victims turned victimizers: Tess, Catherine Deneuve’s character in “Repulsion” and Sigourney Weaver’s in “Death and the Maiden.”

Mr. Polanski’s psychobiographers might do well to keep in mind a recurring tenet of his movies: Things are not always as they seem. Many have described the confined spaces in his films — the apartments, boats, castles and islands that offer no escape — as the visions of a man who spent his childhood in the walled-in ghetto of Krakow. Mr. Polanski has a more benign explanation. In a 2001 interview with the BBC he talked about his early love for Laurence Olivier’s claustrophobic 1948 film “Hamlet,” connecting it to the intimacy of a Vermeer: “I liked films which made you feel you are actually inside an interior, feeling virtually the fourth wall behind you, like in Dutch paintings.”

It is in keeping with the unpredictable turns of Mr. Polanski’s life that his current unhappy chapter should come after “The Pianist,” a stately late-career triumph that many considered a culminating work. More than a quarter century ago he wrote in “Roman by Polanski,” “I am widely regarded, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf.” That caricature had faded away over the years, along with the stories of his brutal on-set perfectionism, replaced by a picture of a marginalized but respected industry elder whom journalists and collaborators have described as reticent and not especially prone to introspection. (He has been married for more than 20 years to the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, with whom he has two children.)

Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of “The Pianist,” has been in regular contact with Mr. Polanski by telephone these past few months.

“I ask him how he is, and he says he’s fine,” Mr. Harwood said. “But I don’t know how he is. No one really does.”

"The Ghost Writer", de Roman Polanski (trailer)

The 60th Berlinale: Films by Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski to celebrate world premieres in the Competition programme

The first seven titles for the Competition of the 60th Berlin International Film Festival have been confirmed. The films selected so far are from Austria , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Croatia , France , Germany , India , Iran , Turkey , the UK and the USA .

This first group of films selected for the Competition is characterized by up-and-coming young directors, stars and masters of filmmaking like Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski.

“The Competition of the 60th anniversary Berlinale will be marked by a mix of styles and genres, by exciting newcomers and renowned directors,” says Festival Director Dieter Kosslick.

The following films have been confirmed for the Competition programme so far:

Bal (Honey) Turkey / Germany
by Semih Kaplanoglu (Süt/Milk, Yumurta/Egg, Melegin Düsüsü/Angel’s Fall)
with Bora Altas, Erdal Besikcioglu, Tülin Özen, Alev Ucarer, Ayse Altay
World premiere

Der Räuber (The Robber) Austria / Germany

by Benjamin Heisenberg (Sleeper, Max-Ophuels-Preis 2006)

with Andreas Lust, Franziska Weisz

World premiere

My Name Is Khan India

by Karan Johar

with Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol

Out of competition

Na Putu (On the Path) Bosnia and Herzegovina / Austria / Germany / Croatia

by Jasmila Žbanić (Grbavica, Golden Bear 2006)

with Zrinka Cvitešić (Shooting Star 2010), Leon Lucev, Ermin Bravo, Mirjana Karanović

World premiere

Shekarchi (The Hunter) Germany / Iran

by Rafi Pitts (Zemestan - It's Winter)

with Rafi Pitts, Mitra Hajjar, Ali Nicksaulat, Hassan Ghalenoi

World premiere

Shutter Island USA

by Martin Scorsese (The Departed, Aviator, Cape Fear)

with Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Sir Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow
World premiere / Out of competition

The Ghost Writer France / Germany / UK

by Roman Polanski (The Pianist, Oscar 2002, China Town, Cul-de-sac, Golden Bear 1966)

with Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams

World premiere

A total of 26 films will be selected for the Competition section of the 60th Berlin International Film Festival. Further Competition title confirmations will be announced in January 2010.

Swiss court grants bail to Polanski (Variety)

A Swiss court has approved Roman Polanski's bail offer of $4.5 million to be released from prison and kept under house arrest and electronic monitoring at his Swiss chalet.

But the Swiss Justice Ministry says it will keep Polanski in jail until it decides whether to appeal his release to the country's supreme court.

Spokesman Folco Galli says the ministry will make its decision "quickly," even though it has 10 days to appeal.

The Swiss Criminal Court still considers Polanski a high flight risk. Its ruling Wednesday said the new bail offer was significant enough to offset those concerns.

The decision does not affect the Swiss government's ongoing assessment of whether it should extradite Polanski to the U.S. for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl.

Roman Polanski es detenido en Suiza por una orden de arresto de EEUU (AFP)

ZÚRICH — El director de cine Roman Polanski fue arrestado el sábado al llegar a Suiza, donde iba a participar en el Festival de Cine de Zúrich, como consecuencia de una orden de detención de EEUU, anunciaron este domingo los organizadores del festival.

Polanski fue detenido en el marco de una acción judicial iniciada por las autoridades norteamericanas hace 30 años. El cineasta, hoy de 76 años de edad, fue detenido en Los Angeles en 1977 a raíz de una demanda judicial presentada por los padres de una adolescente de 13 años.

Entonces reconoció haber tenido "relaciones sexuales ilegales". Pasó en la época 47 días en prisión. A fines de 1978, al día siguiente de una reunión entre sus abogados y un juez, durante la cual éste dio a entender que volvería a ordenar su encarcelamiento, Roman Polanski tomó un avión hacia Europa, donde vive desde entonces.

"The Ghost", de Roman Polanski (Short Teaser)