Admired and respected as one of the world’s great film artisans, Roman
Polanski has led a life full of its own dramatically cinematic highs
and lows. Now a happily settled and seemingly at-peace family man, he’s
been a Holocaust survivor, a brash raconteur and l’enfant terrible,
an Oscar-winning director, a shockingly sudden widower and a fugitive
felon. It’s the latter description, of course, that still hangs most
heavily over him — the result of a 1977 guilty plea for unlawful
sexual intercourse with a minor — and that’s the subject of the new
documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, premiering this week on HBO.

Chock
full of infrequently reported intriguing details (the incident took
place at Jack Nicholson’s house, while he was out of town) and some
speculative sidebar analysis (the prosecutor ruminates on “corruption
winning out over innocence in or over water” in all of Polanski’s films
up to that point), Wanted and Desired
is a fascinating exploration of a complicated case that is still hugely
misunderstood. Serving as both a differential snapshot of the law from
a bygone era and a warts-and-all exploration of the case and its
bizarre, messy aftermath (European press tended to see Polanski as a tragic, brilliant figure, and forgive his faults; one American writer covering the case called the director a “malignant, twisted dwarf”), the movie opens with a statement that at
first blush seems a self-pitying stretch, with the filmmaker subject, in an archival interview snippet, comparing
himself to “a mouse that’s being toyed with by an abominable cat.”
Remarkably, while not excusing the crime, director Marina Zenovich
slowly shows that to be more or less true.

Like many, Zenovich  at first knew only the barest
details of the case: contracted by a European fashion magazine,
Polanski had arranged for a private photo shoot with the then
13-year-old Geimer, signed off on by Geimer’s mother. Charged with a litany of felony counts, including providing drugs to a
minor, he later plead guilty to one count, and fled the country before
sentencing. What Zenovich found out, though, was that Polanski actually served six weeks in Chino State Penitentiary for psychological
analysis, as part of a strange, elongated pas de
trois between legal counsel and adjudicator.

This isn’t a revelation in and of itself, of course, just an underreported fact from the past, but how the case arrived at that point in an era of indeterminate sentencing —
where Polanski could have been sent to jail from anywhere from six
months to 50 years — is a twisted story of play-acted justice. For that, Polanski needs a foil, and while Wanted and
Desired is indeed awash in grey in the picture it delivers of
Polanski, one of the more interesting characters that emerges is the
judge in the case. Laurence Rittenband had previously shown an
inclination for the spotlight, requesting and receiving oversight of
paternity suits against Spencer Tracy and Marlon Brando, among other
celebrity cases. His strange and overly solicitous courtship of the
media turned what was already a circus — with European press, not
bound by victim confidentiality rules, descending on Geimer’s school
and outing her identity — into something even more surreal and fatally flawed. (As an interesting sidebar, lifelong bachelor
Rittenbrand also had at least two girlfriends — “one for the cooking and one for the other stuff, he once explained to a friend — one of whom was 30 years
younger than him.)

A
riveting examination of the story behind the sound-bite, Wanted and Desired is superbly constructed with archival footage and modern day interviews, and is notable for the unanimity it
locates amidst all the murky morality of the situation. Even prosecutor
Roger Gunson, a straight-arrow Mormon who would eventually publicly side with
defense attorney Doug Dalton in some of the more explosive allegations
regarding the handling of the case, says that under the circumstances
he’s not surprised Polanski fled. As for Polanski, one can abhor
the crime, but still glimpse the pathology that informed it, dating
back to the brutal 1969 murder of his pregnant fiancée, Sharon Tate. As
he revealingly says in a rare interview with Clive James from 1984
which bookends the film, “Well, different people deal with things in
different ways — some go to whorehouses, some go to monasteries.” (HBO/ThinkFILM, unrated, 99 minutes)