The pull of Polanski

This is no way intended to address Roman Polanski’s guilt or innocence or whether his recent arrest for having sex with a 13-year-old over three decades ago was fair or unjust. I merely want to point out that he may have had the most extraordinary life of anyone born in the 20th century; indeed, he lived more by the age of 40 than many families do over generations. Consider:

-Born in 1933 and largely raised in Krakow, Polanski was separated from his parents during Word War II. He managed to stay alive, sometimes with the help of others, other times living on his own. At the end of the war, he discovered both parents had been placed in concentration camps. His father survived, his mother did not. He experienced all this by the age of 12. Out of necessity, he’d grown up long before he became a teenager. Does it, if not justify, at least in some way explain why he would feel a 13-year-old girl was a woman? At the minimum, it makes his reported references to her being “almost 14” less monstrous.

-Post-WWII he lived under Soviet rule as the offspring of a Jew and Catholic (who weren’t a whole lot more popular under the Communists than the Nazis). In time he got into acting and then filmmaking and by 1964 received a Best Foreign Film Academy Award nomination for directing Knife in the Water.

-He moved to France and then on to England. By 1965 he has made Repulsion, with Catherine Deneuve.

-By 1968 he has made the blockbuster Rosemary’s Baby, which establishes him as a international celebrity. He has created films both successful and frequently brilliant in an array of nations and in a variety of languages.

-In 1969 Charles Manson enters his life, butchering his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and four others in his home while he is in London. Polanski is initially viewed as having caused the event in some way with his weird films, before Manson and his family are caught and it is determined Manson’s beef was actually with the home’s previous occupant.

All this happened before Polanski turned 36.

He would go on to make Chinatown (in my opinion, one of the 20 greatest movies ever), sleep with an underage girl at Jack Nicholson’s house, flee the country, win an Oscar for the haunting The Pianist, and finally — 31 years after the initial crime and now 76-years-old — be arrested while on the way to receive a lifetime achievement award in Switzerland, where he felt comfortable enough to own a home.

He is a uniquely remarkable man, even if he is not necessarily a decent one.

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