Features
Roman Polanski’s take on the Dreyfus Affair is perfect for 2025. That’s the problem
By Talya ZaxAugust 8, 2025
(Ed. note: An Officer and a Spy is not yet available for streaming in Canada. It is available for streaming on Prime Video in the U.S.)
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
In the opening scene of Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy, a retelling of the infamous Dreyfus Affair — in which Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer, was falsely accused of treason at the turn of the 20th century — Dreyfus, played by Louis Garrel, is paraded past a silent crowd of his peers to suffer a punishment known as degradation.
That is historically accurate. In 1895, after his conviction, Dreyfus underwent the public humiliation of having the adornments of his rank ripped off his person, and his sword broken, all while he vainly protested his innocence.
But for anyone familiar with Polanski’s own history — or the history of this film, which was released in Europe in 2019, but is only now getting its U.S. theatrical premiere — the double meaning is clear.
Because Polanski, who in 1977 pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor,” is one of the legions of Hollywood men to face public disgrace over sexual misbehavior. (He fled to Europe after learning that a judge planned to issue him a harsher sentence than was agreed in his plea deal.) When An Officer and a Spy first came out, Polanski said that his attraction to the Dreyfus story was in part attached to his own case: “I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done,” he said.
What a difference six years makes. In 2019, only two years after the #MeToo movement rocketed to public prominence, Polanski’s film couldn’t secure distribution in the United States. In 2023, the next movie he made, a poorly reviewed comedy called The Palace, suffered the same fate.
But in 2025, the backlash against #MeToo has reached an apogee, and allegations of rampant antisemitism have come to define much of American political life. Now, An Officer and a Spy‘s long-delayed American premiere — a two-week run at Manhattan’s Film Forum, beginning on Friday — suggests that Polanski’s barely-veiled “J’accuse” against his detractors may be newly relevant.
A scapegoat in search of a savior
Dreyfus is not the hero of An Officer and a Spy. Instead, he’s a foil for the rest of the action: a convenient martyr, whom Garrel bestows with a kind of drippy intensity. No one, including the film’s real subject — Georges Picquart, the antisemitic army official who trained Dreyfus and reluctantly comes to campaign against his conviction — has much attention to spare for him.
Even Polanski seems bored by Dreyfus’ suffering; when his camera visits the desert island to which Dreyfus is banished, it’s more fascinated by the desolate landscape than the lonely Jew wasting away within it. And as Picquart, played by Jean Dujardin, pieces together the conspiracy that framed his formal pupil, he doesn’t appear to feel any real compulsion to reconsider his general distaste for the man himself.
Instead, he’s driven by his commitment to the ideals that have informed his career in the French army, chief among them orderliness and an adherence to proper procedure. To the extent that Picquart is radicalized by his adventures as a political outcast — a natural consequence of his insistence on airing the truth — it’s by becoming skeptical of the official structures in which he once put faith, not skeptical of his own inclination toward bigotry.
In other words, this is the story of a crusader so committed to justice that he sees his personal feelings as unimportant. If Polanski thinks of himself as Dreyfus — polarizing and perhaps unlikable, but the victim of a moral panic nonetheless — he is, in an Officer and a Spy, putting out a call for some powerful party to serve as his Picquart. Which brave soul, the film wonders, will take a similar stand against the social furor that made Polanski a cultural outcast — albeit one who won multiple César Awards, the French equivalent to the Oscars, for this film — not because they like him, but because they can see that what he’s suffered is wrong?
That framing is a bold choice. The men who have attempted post-#MeToo comebacks have generally done so from a stance of bashful victimhood. When Kevin Spacey, whom more than 30 men have accused of sexual assault or inappropriate behavior, received an award at a gala hosted during this year’s Cannes Film Festival, he portrayed himself as a wrongly outcast golden boy now receiving his just rewards. “I feel surrounded by so much affection and love,” he said.
Polanski is doing something different. He’s not suggesting that he’s too nice and gentle to be responsible for all the things of which he’s been accused. Instead, he’s arguing that no matter how much his viewers might hate his guts, they should turn a gimlet eye upon the processes that led to his banishment from Hollywood, the U.S., and even many institutions of European cinema. (A French woman accused Polanski of rape shortly before An Officer and a Spy‘s French release; amid an outcry over French accolades for the film, Polanski didn’t attend that year’s César Awards, and when he was announced as Best Director, several attendees walked out in protest.)
The allegory of antisemitism
After Dreyfus is carted away to exile, in An Officer and a Spy, Picquart, who watched his degradation, is summoned by a superior who asks how the crowd reacted. The feeling, Picquart says, was that of a body that had rid itself of a pestilence.
Polanski is examining how the establishment reacts to what it perceives as the will of the public — how its self-protective mechanisms lead it to be in a constant race to anticipate the people’s prejudices, and fulfill them.
In his vision, the parties complicit in framing Dreyfus appear to be driven not by personal antisemitism so much as the sense that, because Jews have come to be widely held in suspicion by France’s citizenry, acting against Jews is a sure way to maintain their own hold on power. The generals who eventually perjure themselves in an attempt to prevent Picquart’s success know that if they admit that Dreyfus was innocent, the public won’t see them as noble and brave. They’ll see them, instead, as having joined with nefarious forces for personal gain.
Polanski, in making An Officer and a Spy, accurately anticipated a cultural turn that would see all kinds of people beginning to perceive themselves as “the Jews” in situations of societal discord: victims of a witch hunt, based on an ambient cultural sense that someone should be held accountable for all the things that are wrong in all our lives, while authorities tacitly encourage the scapegoating.
It happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, as some who were resistant to public health measures began comparing themselves to Jews in Nazi Germany. It’s happening now, as some Republicans have tried to turn Jews into avatars for conservatives, with the argument being that both groups have been persecuted by promoters of “wokeness.”
There is a natural parallel, as well, in the story of #MeToo. In the movement’s heyday, the locus of power in the sexual realm seemed to have shifted. The time in which successful men could basically do as they pleased was over. A new power structure had been adopted; adherents of the old one began to see themselves as victims of a shadowy new elite.
What happens when people begin to see a real historical conspiracy as an analogy for every development they dislike? Do they find a harmless outlet for their grievances, or do they simply risk becoming more suspicious, and more conspiratorial? In a U.S. where the president owns a social media outlet called Truth, any number of people going to see An Officer and a Spy might see something of their own plight in that of Dreyfus. And any number of them might idolize Picquart as a vigilante uncovering deep governmental rot.
They may or may not be right. After all, there’s much injustice in the world, today as at the turn of the century. But I fear that while An Officer and a Spy might be trying to investigate the kind of conspiratorial mindset that gave rise to the Dreyfus Affair, what it’s really doing is reinforcing it.
Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at zax@forward.com or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
Features
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Features
Musings from Dizengoff Street – by Bruce Brown
(August 8, 2026)
Outside Basimta Café in Central Jerusalem. Love the red shirt against a tiny sea of black. Not sure I am shrugging because of the ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat or the lack of an ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat. For the last six weeks Israeli headlines shouted about the cafe chaos. With the ultra-religious blocking entrances and storming the café. While shouting ‘Shabbos! Shabbos!’ Upsetting the secular amongst us just wanting to enjoy our Saturday iced matchas. So the wife and I thought we would check it out. And. Yes. Buy something to support the business. Uproar. Not. Blocked entrances. Not. Storming the café. Not. Albeit there were police barriers separating the devout protesters from the coffee drinkers. The protesters being just a few dozen black clad, pious Jews. Mostly teenagers. And yes. Shouting ‘Shabbos! Shabbos!’ Certainly underwhelming in its reported mayhem. Reminds me of the famous saying misattributed to Mark Twain – “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.” But I did enjoy my iced matcha.
(August 6, 2026)
Here we go again. Another round of forever negotiations. As someone who negotiates for a living. The way things are going in the straits. If I had to recommend a book on the subject to a new hire. Between The Art of the Deal, A Presidential Edition by Donald J. Trump or The Real Art of the Deal by the Mullahs of Iran with a special forward by the IRGC. Well. I would choose the latter.
(August 3)
Bravo Yoav Segalovitz, Liberal Yesh Atid MK and Monsour Abbas, United Arab Ra’am MK and party head. For breaking a glass ceiling where a Jewish lawmaker joins an Arab political party. No less a political earthquake in my little shtetl. Which can significantly impact coalition block arithmetic and posturing and strategy in the upcoming elections. Now Ra’am can be considered a legitimate ‘Zionist’ partner when forming coalition blocks and potentially pushing the ‘center left/right’ party over the 60 seat majority threshold. In our crazy parliamentary democracy defined by a multi-party (about fourteen!!), proportional representation system. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Israel’s proportional representation model of governance is the best parliamentary democracy system except for all other forms of working democracies. Stay tuned for more amateurish political musings as we move towards Israel’s 26th national election – five of them held since 2019.
(August 1)
Although both sides say they are open to diplomacy. Neither really trusts the other. And American military action, or its threat, continues. I read headlines in the middle of the night -it’s a nervous habit lately– that the Dynamic Duo of Trump and Netanyahu may again strike in unison. Possibly this weekend. Yikes! Prompting me, at 2:30 AM, to dash around the house stocking my safe room. Bottled water. Canned food. Medicines. Documents. The beat goes on….
If it’s crazy here. It’s insane in Italy. With a recent online ‘Jew Hunt’ in the Milan area. Before being removed, the digital forms urged reportings of Israelis and Italian Jews staying in local hotels. The infamous Global Sumud Movement -yes, the one coordinating ‘peace and humanitarian’ flotillas to Gaza- was somehow connected. Although they deny involvement?! This deranged decree was looking to identify Zionist tourism and Zionist neo-colonization in Italy. I’ll stick with stocking the saferoom.
Then there’s New York Mayor Mamdani, a Global Sumud Movement supporter, threatening to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu if he comes to New York. But since discovered he has no legal right for such a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic antic. Maybe Mandami should be arrested! Or at least impeached. For being a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic mayor.
Here’s a post Bruce sent us Friday, July 31:
WARTIME MUSINGS
Should credible threats against FLOTUS and ‘FSOTUS’ (first son..) not be justification to attack first.
As for yesterday’s summit. Netanyahu really can’t win. Explainer. If Trump now attacks without victory its ’cause of Netanyahu. If Trump now attacks with victory its ’cause of Trump. And, in Israel, if Trump doesn’t attack -victory or not- Netanyahu failed in his eighth meeting with Trump. And if Trump does attack -victory or not- half the country will vilify Bibi anyway. Missing a permutation?
Ya. I know. Kinda’ need a definition of victory for that musing to work.
And here in my little shtetle. We go to sleep unsure if there will be a code red in the middle of the night. And if not. We wake up thinking it will be tonight. How do you define stress?
Seemed like an appropriate way to end this musing.
Bruce Brown is a former Winnipegger who made aliyah to Israel over 35 years ago. Bruce first began writing for us – in his own inimitable style, in 2012, during what was known as “Operation Pillar of Defense.” His occasional musings on aspects of life in Israel that were far from what you’d typically read in other reports from Israel were hugely popular – both in the print Jewish Post & News and on this website.
We’re now glad to report that Bruce is back writing for us – this time on a regular basis. We will post Bruce’s reports as they arrive – with the date of each post at the beginning of that post.
Here’s some information about Bruce – and awards he’s received for his writing:
Bruce Brown. Canadian born. Now living in Israel (for a long time). Bruce works in Israel’s hi-tech sector by day and, in spurts, is a somewhat inspired writer by night. He received the American Jewish Press Association’s award for writing excellence in 2019 and 2025. And wrote the 1998 satire, “An Israeli is….” Bruce’s musings are political, social, economic and personal. With lots of biting, contrarian, sardonic and irreverent insight.
Features
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