Why at 90 years old Polansky has directed this thing is a mystery. It is true that his career is not without its ups and downs. He has made great films that are part of the best history of cinema (Repulsion, The Devil’s Seed, Chinatown -perhaps his best film-, The pianist), he has adapted the classics, diving like few others into the dramatic depths of his works (his reading of Thomas Hardy in Tess and Dickens in Oliver Twist), has dared to create a work that is almost unfilmable due to its Kafkaesque-surrealist tone by Roland Topor (The chimerical tenant), has treated with admirable severity and rigor french antisemitism (the Dreyfus case in The officer and the spy) and its tragic German summit (The pianist) based on real stories, he has signed works of good commercial quality based on successful novels or plays (Frantic, The Ghost Writer, Based on True Stories, A Wild God) or – one of the features that define his filmography – he liked to film uncomfortable abysmal tales of cruelty and self-destruction (Moons of Gall, Death and the Maiden, The Venus of Skins) that link with his first Polish works. But he has also directed bad ones (The Vampire Dancethe very expensive pirates, which was also a failure, The ninth door) or very bad (the once highly valued Cul de sac or the one justly crushed since its premiere That?).
With The Palace seems to want to return to the last two, filmed in 1966 and 1973, and especially to ¿Qué? (it must not be a coincidence that here reappears, unrecognizable, the Sydne Rome who interpreted it). The closed places in which the characters are consumed and/or destroyed – the ships of the knife on the water and ice moonsthe floor of Repulsion– that in the aforementioned Cul de sac and That? They are a castle and a mansion. In this case it is a luxurious hotel where, on the eve of the start of the millennium, dubious magnates, suspicious surgeons, even more suspicious Russians, porn stars, elderly aristocrats or bankers who will be the puppets of a grotesque puppet game which, it is assumed, has a powerful critical charge.
That the script was co-written by Polanski and the octogenarian director, actor and screenwriter Jerzy Skolimowsky, which he co-wrote with him 62 years ago The knife on the water, may give clues – like the presence of Sydne Rome – about the possible character of this film as a return of the director to his most provocative beginnings and specifically to those two films from 1966 and 1973. Or perhaps, in what, given his age and personal situation, is possibly his last film, he wanted to urinate, vomit and defecate on humanity as a whole to show his contempt.
Unfortunately what he has managed to do is make a movie even worse than That?, so far the lowest point of his long career. The rudeness, ugliness and political incorrectness They do not provoke, black or eschatological humor does not make people laugh, the caricature of the powerful and their crimes or vices lacks substance and force. The luxurious cast mostly formed -except Oliver Masucci– for old or damaged glories –Fanny Ardant, John Cleese, Mickey Rourke, Joaquim De Almeida– just gave the film an air of failed Imserso-provocation. Such a great director deserved a better ending, in case this is his farewell.
