My wife and I saw “An Officer and a Spy” last night, which I highly recommend. Because it’s a Roman Polanski film, it’s not being distributed anywhere in the US. Nor is it available on streaming. But you can see it at Film Forum. It’s a superbly made film, about the Dreyfus Affair. Less about Dreyfus himself than about about Georges Picquart, the French officer who played a critical role in getting Dreyfus exonerated. That frame is problematic in all sorts of ways: as David Bell wrote in an excellent piece from a few years ago, when the film came out, the film dramatically underplays the mobilization of the French Jewish community as well as of the Dreyfusards. The entire […]