It seems to me Manohla Dargis’ argument for being able to separate the work from the dumb things Lars Von Trier said in Cannes about being a Nazi might be more persuasive if she’d left out the part about Roman Polanski. As it is, she buried her own lede because the only really compelling part of her piece is this:
All I know is what I see in his movies, which are not Nazi-promoting vehicles for anti-Semitism any more than Mr. Polanski’s are advertisements for rape and pedophilia.
To love a film by Mr. Polanski, though, as I know from other irate readers, is to guarantee that you will be accused of going easy on a criminal. Some of this anger can be blamed on avid Polanski supporters who assert that he did nothing wrong, or that he’s an old man now and has suffered enough. And, true, that Swiss chalet of his where he stayed after he was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 while waiting to hear if he would be deported to America sure looked as chilly as a medieval dungeon. Some Polanski apologists repellently portray his victim as a culpable seducer rather than a 13-year-old who was drugged and marinated in booze. Others trivialize statutory rape, never mind that their opinions are legally immaterial. Some detractors remain insistent that he should return to America to face judgment, as do I.
The plain truth is that the Polanski case can’t really be lumped in with Von Trier, Chaplin, Elia Kazan or Walt Disney: it is a whole separate thing. That is why it prompts readers to react the way they do.
As for Von Trier and Melancholia, which Dargis calls his best film, it seems to be that no one really wants to go near it. To love a film is to celebrate a season of winning. But the bloom is off the rose now and the buzz is gone. I suppose one can’t really talk about Melancholia’s buzz without turning it to the Oscar race, and therein the film, which would have been a tough sell anyway, will have to remain somewhere in a room with The Beaver, a film that involves Mel Gibson who is slightly closer to being in the same camp as Von Trier. I’d have left Polanski out of it. And really with Polanski, must we? Must we really?