An Officer and a Spy

DISCLAIMER: I did not see this movie in its original language(French), but in a dubbed version(Italian). I may have missed some nuances.

I came across this movie while looking at Jean Dujardin's filmography. I had really liked his performance in the OSS movies, so I was keen to see more of him, in a more serious role. Director Roman Polanski is certainly controversial, but he also makes good movies. That's very conflicting to me, but that's not the point of this comment/review.

The story told in _An Officer and a Spy_ (what an awful title, by the way, the French title is much better and interesting) is one that is maybe not that well-known outside of France: the Dreyfus affair. A captain of the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, gets wrongfully convicted of treason for having divulged French military secrets to the Germans. In the following years, the head of counter-espionage for the French Army discovers the real culprit and that Dreyfus had been convicted with very little to no evidence. But revealing his discoveries only costs him troubles and splits the public opinion, especially after the famous "J'accuse" article by Emilé Zola.

I thought the movie was very well-paced; obviously it's not a fast movie, but I was afraid it would be so slow and tedious as to be boring. Instead, it's very engaging and the two hours runtime goes by quite fast.

I really enjoyed the costume design and the visual aspect of the movie, I thought they were really well done. I don't know how accurate to the time they were, but they certainly looked the part!

The cast felt really solid to me, I liked all the performances and especially Dujardin's. As I said, I first encountered him in a very silly comedic role, so I was very impressed in his acting in something totally different.

Overall, it's an interesting movie about an interesting bit of history. I think the biggest problem with _An Officer and A Spy_ is its director. It's hard to separate his very controversial life (personally it's not that controversial to me, it's pretty clear he should be facing his conviction) from this movie, which is genuinely well done.

7.5/10

Good acting, great costumes and production, 7.5/10.

The Dreyfus case revisited, once again.

Émile Zola is the best French writer of all time, and not because he's my favorite. He's France's best writer because his 20-volume novelization of the country's 2nd Empire is a monument to French literature. He's my favorite writer because not only is he enormously talented, but in an epoch when antisemitism was systematic and systemic, he (a casual antisemite himself as a child of his era) stood up against the army, Ministry of Defense and the entire nation to decry a cover-up concerning the innocence of an exiled Jewish officer.

Zola is a gifted artist who also possess integrity, a combination that is as precious as it is rare. Many modern 'artists' simply use their talent as an excuse to commit unforgivable atrocities.

(For example: towards the middle of this film a convicted pedophile makes a cameo appearance in a party scene!)