Roman Polanski won an Oscar for his adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman's Holocaust novel The Pianist and recently finished work on an overhaul of Oliver Twist. In the meantime his offscreen dramas have come to resemble a contemporary update of L'Etranger. Presumably he's too busy living Camus's landmark existential novel to get around to adapting it.
L'Etranger, lest we forget, follows the trial of a French-Algerian clerk called Meursault. Ostensibly Meursault is in the dock for the murder of an Arab, although the prosecution instead opts to build its case around the defendant's behaviour in the immediate aftermath of his mother's death, focusing in particular on a sexual dalliance that took place the day after the funeral. In this way the prosecution makes the case that here is a man incapable of showing remorse, a sociopath; quite literally "a stranger" to the norms of human behaviour.
And so it is with Polanski who has seen his actions in the wake of Sharon Tate's murder become a touchstone for his entire character; the key that unlocks the man. The director has launched a libel action against Vanity Fair for alleging that he took time out on the way to Tate's funeral to proposition a model at a swish New York eatery. According to Polanski, this is an "abominable lie" that "dishonours my memory of Sharon".
If nothing else, the libel case reveals the curious morality of the man who launched it. Here is a man, it implies, who would think nothing of having sex with an inebriated 13-year-old, just so long as he's not burying his wife the next morning. It also calls to mind the apocryphal tale of the Democrat candidate who was lambasted by his Republican rival as a corrupt, murdering liberal rapist and objected to being called a liberal.
But as with Camus's novel, one can't shake the suspicion that this is a trial-within-a-trial, and that Polanski's whole worth as a human being has been put on the scales. Legally speaking, it is no crime to fancy a spot of sex following the death of a spouse (if it were the jails would be fairly packed with randy widowers). And yet there is the sense that such behaviour is unseemly, that it violates some basic rule of decency, and that if a man is guilty of this he must surely be guilty of other things, of everything. Perhaps Roman Polanski realises this. Maybe that's why he's fighting the case.
