France’s Growing Pushback Against Roman Polanski

PARIS—The French cultural establishment has defended, protected, and lauded Roman Polanski. The director fled the U.S. in 1978 after to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl, and has successfully evaded extradition back to the States over the years, most recently in 2016, when Poland rejected the request. But today, the a bit in France. Polanski’s latest film, (known here as) opened last week, and has been . It’s a vivid historical drama about a moment that shaped modern France. The movie is set between 1894, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was convicted of treason and sentenced to prison on charges of espionage trumped up by his anti-Semitic superiors, and 1906, when Dreyfus was finally pardoned, thanks in large part to the novelist(or “I accuse”).