Drama, thriller and crime: Roman Polański cycle at Flagey

The life and career of Polish director Roman Polański has been a steeplechase. At 84, he has enjoyed the greatest of successes, but his life has been marked by extraordinarily bleak experiences.

Polański grew up in the Jewish ghetto of 1940s Kraków, alone once his parents were shipped to concentration camps. He spent six years doing nothing but trying to survive.

In 1969, while living in the US, Polański’s wife Sharon Tate was brutally killed by the Manson Family in one of the most notorious murder cases in American history. Tate was pregnant at the time.

In 1977, Polański was convicted of the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl, which led to a media circus and judicial manipulations that would see him flee the country.

Those three events have shaped, willingly or unwillingly, his film career, which reached an apex in 2002 with The Pianist. Polański incorporated his war memories in the biopic of the Polish composer and musician Władysław Szpilman, who also survived the Kraków ghetto. The Pianist received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

When Polański fled the US, he was already a world-famous director, having made a number of high-profile films, including Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown. Flagey’s programme skips over these in favour of his pre- and post-America career.

Being a fugitive, Polański could never go back to the US and had to restart his career from France. This period led to Frantic, a thriller with Harrison Ford, who loses his wife in Paris, the Thomas Hardy-adaptation Tess and Bitter Moon, the story of a destructive passion.

The outbursts of tense violence in 2011’s Carnage are characteristic of the director’s oeuvre. They were already there in his debut, his only Polish-language film, Knife in the Water. Sometimes they are delivered with a humoristic twist, like in his early horror spoof, The Fearless Vampire Killers.

1 September to 15 October, Flagey, Brussels. Photo: Adrien Brody and Roman Polański on the set of The Pianist