An Officer and a Spy

An Officer and a Spy (2019) tells the Dreyfus affair from the point of view not of Dreyfus but of the officer who uncovered it. Georges Picquart takes over French military intelligence and realises that Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of espionage, is innocent and the real spy is still at large. The army's response is not to correct the error but to silence Picquart. The film concentrates on the bureaucratic side of the case: files, handwriting analysis, closed courts. It shows antisemitism operating less as mob feeling than as an institutional reflex. The source is Robert Harris's novel and Harris wrote the screenplay with Polanski. Jean Dujardin plays Picquart and Louis Garrel plays Dreyfus. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice in 2019, and the award was contested at the festival; prizes given to Polanski were protested because of the offence he admitted in 1977 and his flight from sentencing. The parallel he drew between his own situation and Dreyfus's was criticised separately, and rightly so, because the difference between the two is not small. It runs 132 minutes. Good for: historical legal drama, the anatomy of institutional lying, and classical storytelling. Less good for: the pace is heavy and most of the characters are officers carrying files. Dreyfus himself stays at the margin; the film is about the career of the man defending him rather than his suffering. For many viewers the director cannot be separated from the film, and that is a legitimate reason to skip it.