Roman Polanski

“The Pianist”

Roman Polanski's wrenching World War II magnum opus confronts the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto and the moral complexities of war -- and asserts the power of art, just maybe, to triumph over nihilism.

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When a well-known filmmaker who is nearly 70, and who possesses a distinctive style and singular sensibility, changes his way of making movies, it’s surely a sign of his faith in both the medium itself and his own creative powers, a sign that he possesses the confidence to make a sea change at the age when most directors are winding down their careers. Or, as in the case of Roman Polanski’s extraordinary new film “The Pianist,” it can herald the artistic essentialism that comes with age.

In “The Pianist,” Polanski is saying what he has long wanted to say, confronting the roots of his own preoccupations and obsessions, and he allows nothing to get in the way. It’s his most emotionally direct film, at times even a brutally blunt film. “The Pianist,” which was adapted by the playwright Ronald Harwood (“The Dresser”) from the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish classical pianist who spent World War II on the run in Warsaw, offers a direct parallel to Polanski’s own experience as a Jewish boy hiding in the Krakow ghetto and then on the run through the Polish countryside (an experience his friend Jerzy Kosinski drew on in his novel “The Painted Bird”).

When we see Nazis ordering Jews to run through the streets as they gun them down, we can’t help but think of how laughing German soldiers used the young Polanski for target practice while the terrified boy dodged their bullets. Polanski is going to the source of the themes of victimization and violence that have run through his movies. Only this time, there is none of the sardonic ghoulishness that has characterized his work.

Like the dead-rotting face of Mrs. Bates subliminally imprinted on her son Norman at the end of “Psycho,” a death’s-head grin seemed to emerge on the very celluloid of pictures like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown.” The black humor of those films (like Faye Dunaway’s character in “Chinatown” having a “flaw” in her eye, the same eye later shot out of her head) was without compassion. The grim hopelessness of Polanski’s humor was the coping strategy of someone whose life had twice been marked by pure evil. You could understand where it came from and still be repulsed by it.

There is no such distancing in “The Pianist.” Here Polanski is almost frighteningly open to the portrayal of inexplicable evil. At times I felt myself pulling away from the screen, as if Polanski were milking my response. When Nazis pick ghetto Jews out of a milling crowd and force them to dance, Polanski shows us a cripple on crutches falling to the ground. Polanski rubs our face in the obviousness of the cruelty, and it’s grating; that man seems doubly humiliated. And yet were Polanski to shrink from the worst it would seem inappropriately prim. He might almost be answering here for the grotesqueries his own films have relished.

Experience alone cannot trump art. But it can lend art an unimpeachable authority. And if anyone has a right to depict the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, it’s Polanski. “The Pianist” took the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival but almost immediately, the critical word coming out of Cannes was that it was Polanski’s most conventional movie, something like an old-fashioned well-made studio film of the ’40s. Is it the directness of the film that generated that response? Whatever the reason, classifying “The Pianist” as conventional doesn’t take into account how the film proceeds from the unblinking depiction of Nazi atrocities into territory which is artistically very risky, and how Polanski complicates the righteous anger the film stirs up in us. I think Polanski is attempting to put us in the shoes of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) by making the events of the movie so direct and overwhelming that they cannot be easily sorted out. He makes us feel but does not always tell us how or even what to feel.

Early on we see Wladyslaw’s father (Frank Finlay) viciously slapped by a Nazi for failing to bow to him on the street, as Warsaw residents pass by the injured old man, paying him no notice. Is it an acceptance of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism or simple self-preservation, the Poles’ knowledge of what would happen to them if they attempted to intervene? Shortly after that, we see ghetto Jews attempting to carry on their everyday business while the corpses of those who have died of starvation litter the streets. It’s impossible to resolve your feelings about those scenes — are we watching callousness or some sort of subtly heroic defiance, a determination that life, even this stunted life, should continue? Polanski complicates things even further by showing us that determination to survive taken to its most logical and horrible conclusion: the Jewish policemen who, to ensure their own survival, worked for the Nazis keeping order in the ghetto.

On the surface, the first half of “The Pianist” follows a familiar course. Wladyslaw’s middle-class family, his parents, two sisters and brother, are moved from their spacious apartment to a cramped one in the newly barricaded Warsaw ghetto, and then to workers’ barracks, and then to the trains that will take them to the camps. It’s a gripping, assured piece of filmmaking, though perhaps the fact that we have all seen and read stories like this, in films about the Holocaust and in memoirs of the time, keeps us from grasping just how distinctive it is.

The film has the simultaneous feel of being observed as it happens and of springing from a complete vision. We all know about the horrors the European Jews faced. But no movie has ever presented them in quite this way. Again and again in “The Pianist,” the Szpilman family glimpses those horrors from a removed vantage point; for example, from their darkened apartment as Nazis raid a Jewish building across the street. And later, Wladyslaw watches the Warsaw ghetto uprising from the high windows of apartments where he is hiding. I think Polanski uses this motif, watching murder and death from a window, to convey the derangement of everyday life under the Nazis. “The Pianist” is very much about how notions like the familiarity and safe haven of home became an alien concept in wartime.

Polanski is also robbing those of us watching the film of our notion of a safe haven. As he did in 1995′s “Death and the Maiden,” his best film previous to “The Pianist,” Polanski is addressing the inadequacy of culture in the face of the unthinkable. That film, with its Latin American doctor turned rapist and torturer, a man who liked to listen to Schubert while he worked, was an attempt to get at how, while pretending to deal with the most horrible events of recent history, culture can actually smooth them over, make them seem safe, contain them and reduce them within the confines of “art.” Polanski knows that no book or painting or movie can make mass murder explicable. The passionate messiness and rage of “Death and the Maiden” was a way of saying that art can never be equal to the kind of experience the tortured heroine underwent or, by extension, the experience Polanski suffered as a child or that young Wladyslaw Szpilman suffered in the Warsaw ghetto.

You sense that theme being picked up in the rawness that marks the first half of “The Pianist,” in Polanski’s refusal to deflect the impact of the senseless shootings and beatings by aestheticizing them. And yet, because he is an artist, Polanski can’t help making art of Szpilman’s experience, can’t help trying to be true to both his own artistry and his experience — though it’s not the kind of art any of us might have expected in a film about the Holocaust.

Nothing in the first half of “The Pianist” prepares you for the audacity of what comes after Wladyslaw, having been spared the death camps, lives as a worker in the ghetto before escaping and, with the help of various members of the underground resistance, hiding in a series of unoccupied apartments. Until this time, Wladyslaw has seemed an almost remote character, really only alive when he’s behind the keyboard. There’s a heartbreaking moment when Wladyslaw, in one of his hideouts, holds his hands inches above a keyboard and goes through the motions of playing. Striking the keys themselves would be to risk discovery. Stripped of the possibility of playing, Wladyslaw is, in a sense, stripped of his identity. Brody’s performance is astonishing in the way it actually keeps us distanced from Wladyslaw when he is most secure, most “whole” — we come to feel closest to him when he’s reduced to the impulse to survive.

I can’t imagine what Brody put himself through physically for this film. His hair and beard give him the look of a derelict, and his weight loss makes him seem one of the walking corpses of that time. It’s a largely wordless, almost completely interior performance, a compendium of eloquent silences and a bottomless humanity. We watch Brody as Wladyslaw scrounges crumbs and shelter, as he carries around a can of pickles in hopes of finding a can opener, as all concept of time vanishes except the few minutes to come.

In the last hour of the film, Polanski and Brody come close to making a great silent comedy about the Holocaust. That’s not to say that what we see is funny, but Brody’s huge, somber eyes and rail-thin frame call to mind Buster Keaton making his way stoically through one disaster after another. Polanski seems to be channeling the sadness at the heart of film comedy, especially Keaton’s films. When Wladyslaw vaults a wall to escape some German soldiers and begins running away, the camera pulls up to take in the vast, overpowering landscape of the destroyed Warsaw.

After a few breathless strides, Wladyslaw stops dead in his tracks, stunned into stillness by what he sees, stung by the black joke of their being nowhere to escape to, of what survival means when it looks as if there is no life anywhere. In that moment, he’s a bit like Keaton wandering through a hurricane in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” alone in the universe, just skirting calamity by luck or invention. When a German officer comes upon Wladyslaw in hiding and asks him what he is doing, and Wladyslaw, proffering his precious pickles, answers, “I was just trying to open this can,” we seem to have traveled from Keaton to Samuel Beckett. It’s the summation of the black humor that runs through the film, a definition of a sorrowful, existential state that can conceive of no future beyond the next task. Brody’s reading of that line can make you laugh as tears are running down your face. (In moments like this, Polanski’s film can be seen as a rebuke to the cretinous sentimentality of Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful.”)

Until Thomas Kretschmann enters the film as that officer (his part is small, but his performance is vivid and crucial to the movie), every actor who plays a Nazi is atrocious. They seem to be digging into the worst clichés of Nazis as leering, piggy sadists. I think the badness, the clichéd portrayal of evil, is intentional on Polanski’s part. It sets us up for the curve that Kretschmann’s appearance throws us and, after the rage that has built in us as we have watched the Nazi brutalization of the Jews, prevents us from going home with our hatred. What Polanski is doing here could, in lesser hands, have easily turned the film into a soggy brotherhood speech. For Polanski, it is simply an acknowledgment of the moral complications of wartime.

If anyone has the authority to speak about the scars that violence can leave on life, it’s Roman Polanski. Maybe his desire here to get something of his own experience down on film has made him ask what is really important to him. He seems to have concluded that survival must have a meaning beyond hatred and nihilism and hopelessness. And in the closing scene of Wladyslaw playing with an orchestra after the war (the piece he performs is Chopin’s Grand Polonaise for piano and orchestra, the same piece we see him silently practicing while in hiding), Polanski reverses the end of “Death and the Maiden,” with its insistence that the niceties of culture are irrelevant in the face of the unthinkable.

Instead, the director seems to be saying that, for survivors, art may be a way back to our finer selves, the selves that have no place when life is reduced to the imperative to survive. In the liner notes to the CD of his Carnegie Hall debut, the Russian pianist Mikhail Pletnev writes, “I want to make music sound so strong, make it visibly significant and appealing to the most essential basic feelings of every human individual.” In “The Pianist,” that’s what Roman Polanski has done.

Charles Taylor is a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger.

“Carnage”: Jodie Foster crackles in Roman Polanski’s NYC comedy

Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslet and John C. Reilly also star in this crisp and clever adaptation of a hit play

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John C. Reilly, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet in "Carnage"

A brisk and bracing four-handed comedy about two Brooklyn, N.Y., bourgeois couples whose polite get-together to sort out a playground fight between their children descends into near-savagery, “Carnage” made a perfect opening-night entry for this year’s New York Film Festival. Stars Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly got a standing ovation, and French playwright Yasmina Reza, who co-wrote the screenplay based on her worldwide stage hit “God of Carnage,” took the mic for a few remarks. But where was the director? Too busy and/or too important to show up for his own movie in Alice Tully Hall?

I kid, I kid. For better or worse, Roman Polanski has once again become a more or less normal figure in the world of international cinema, as the NYFF’s selection of “Carnage” made clear. His 2009 arrest in Switzerland ultimately came to nothing, after the Swiss authorities declined to extradite him to the United States to face sentencing for his 1978 rape conviction. Everyone at that Manhattan screening understood that he wouldn’t be there, and indeed it seems highly unlikely that Polanski, who is now 78, will ever set foot on American soil again.

You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud, however, to deduce that the master stylist who made “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” has unfinished business with America. Polanski’s last film, released shortly after his Swiss arrest, was “The Ghost Writer,” a clever, twisty thriller that used the North Sea coast of Germany (somewhat implausibly) to stand in for its Martha’s Vineyard setting. Its story was based on a Robert Harris novel, but you couldn’t help noticing that it was about a raffish international playboy forced into foreign exile by legal problems and a secret from his 1970s past.

“Carnage” contains no particular echoes of Polanski’s biography, but it’s definitely a work of Euro-American schizophrenia. It replicates the Brooklyn Heights or Cobble Hill apartment of Michael and Penelope Longstreet (Reilly and Foster, respectively) on a French studio set, complete with digital inserts of the Brooklyn waterfront seen through the windows. The film’s funniest performance comes from long-faced Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, an Oscar winner for “Inglourious Basterds,” who’s utterly convincing as Alan Cowan, a scumbag lawyer who’s managing some kind of P.R. crisis for a pharmaceutical client, via smartphone, even as he’s making chitchat with the Longstreets. It’s Alan who tells Reilly’s Mike, after their perfunctory meeting over coffee has degenerated into booze, vomiting and brutality, “I believe in the god of carnage.”

Alan’s cellphone, along with Penny Longstreet’s beloved art books, are among the totems destroyed by the god of carnage in this tightly structured comedy of manners, which is roughly one part “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and one part Luis Buñuel’s “Exterminating Angel.” Although Reza’s script (co-written with Polanski) stops short of full-on surrealism or science fiction, it begins to seem as if Alan and his prissy, uptight wife, Nancy (Kate Winslet), actually can’t leave the Longstreets’ apartment, or at least not until these couples’ collision of class and sensibility reaches some resolution.
If Alan revels in privilege, power and lack of principle and Nancy is the model of upper-crust decorum — at least until she violates it egregiously — Mike and Penny are meant, on the surface, to seem more middle-class and “relatable.” He’s a contractor who made good, and she’s a highly strung, oversensitive liberal type who is concerned about Tibet and the Sudan and has some vaguely arty career. It’s one of Foster’s best and funniest performances, even if her transformation, like everybody else’s, is telegraphed in advance. Penny’s supposed sensitivity and concern for others of course conceals a near-psychotic madness (as well as an unexpected appetite for alcohol early in the day).

Seeing these four actors launching Reza’s zingers at each other at high speed is pretty much worth the price of admission all by itself, and one thing you always know about Polanski is that he won’t waste your time. I don’t actually think “Carnage” is an especially memorable film, but it’s brilliantly shot and executed, traversing the bland, upper-middle spaces of the Longstreets’ apartment with masterful economy. In a holiday season crammed with promiscuously wasteful two-hour-plus movies that seek to milk every possible emotion from you, this one keeps you laughing for 79 minutes and sends you home. But as you’re pulling your coat back on, don’t miss the tiny but important coda that happens behind the closing credits.

“Carnage” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.

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Who wants to buy Sharon Tate’s jewelry?

An auction house offers a piece of notorious Manson murder history -- but why would someone want it?

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Who wants to buy Sharon Tate's jewelry? Sharon Tate (Credit: Wikipedia)

It’s an oval opal ring, surrounded by garnets. Four stones appear to be missing. Its estimated value is somewhere between $25,000 and $50,000. And next week, is going up for auction with Gotta Have Rock and Roll with the opening bid of $10,000.

What is it that makes this particular piece of jewelry so potentially valuable? Is it the elegance of the piece? Is it the fact that it was purchased by an internationally renowned, Oscar-winning director? Or is it because the ring was allegedly worn by his pretty, pregnant wife the night she was savagely murdered by the Manson family?

On its item description, the auction house — which also currently has a few tufts of Michael Jackson’s hair “collected from the room he was staying in at the Carlyle Hotel” going for a cool thousand bucks, — claims the bauble is Sharon Tate’s “engagement ring, given to her by fiancé Roman Polanski.” But the New York Daily News reported Wednesday that parent company Gotta Have It partner Pete Siegel asserts that Tate was wearing it when she was killed. He adds, “Who knows where the bidding will end up? She was so beautiful and innocent, and very popular.” And you thought those thrill seeking true-crime fans of a recent episode of “American Horror Story,” thrilled to hold the same ashtray a killer bashed a victim with, were just make-believe.

On the evening of Aug. 9, 1969, the eight-months pregnant Tate, four other individuals and Tate’s unborn son were killed by the Manson’s family’s Charles “Tex” Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins. Tate was the last to die. As she begged for her life and that of her child, Atkins told her, “Look, bitch, I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby. You had better be ready. You’re going to die and I don’t feel anything about it.” Tate was then stabbed 16 times. Once she was dead, Atkins used Tate’s blood to scrawl the word “PIG” on a porch wall. Makes you want to run right out and buy some bling, doesn’t it?

Though Tate’s sister Debra acknowledges Sharon owned the ring, she strongly disputes the ring was on Tate’s finger the night of the murder, or that it was even her engagement ring. (Should you choose to study the images of her wedding or have the stomach for the grisly photos of the murder scene for a glimpse of her hand, they’re inconclusive.) Debra told TMZ Tuesday week that “The ring was not Sharon’s style and she never wore it,” and added, “Because Sharon was pregnant, she couldn’t fit any rings on her finger.”

On Wednesday, the auction house clarified via a spokesman that “it was speculated that the ring was on Sharon Tate’s finger at the time of death but never confirmed so we do not dispute Tate’s sister Debra’s claim.” There is, however, one existing photo of Tate wearing the ring on her pinky, adjacent to her slim wedding band.

Gotta Have It’s Siegel calls the ring simply “a great item of Hollywood collectibles.” But come on. Surely macabre curiosity is why Gotta Have It has played up “Sharon’s tragic murder” in its description of the ring, and encouraged the notion that it played a more central role in Tate’s life than it may in fact have had.

Maybe the ring’s significance doesn’t matter if you’re not the sort of person who cares about owning something a famous woman had on as her pregnant belly was being hacked into. But why would someone shell out 10 grand or more for an item if not for Manson family bragging rights? Gotta Have It knows what it’s really auctioning here, and it’s not just a “Hollywood collectible.” Instead, it’s a little bit of what Susan Atkins said she felt the night she killed Tate. It’s a lot less gruesome and a lot more expensive, but it comes from the same place. Repulsively, it’s the opportunity, as Atkins once put it, “to taste death.”

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Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub.

9. “The Ghost Writer”

Roman Polanski's thrilling economy turns the film's final sequence into nearly perfect entertainment

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9.

Roman Polanski is an economical director, and “The Ghost Writer” is one of his most economical films. This story of an unnamed man (Ewan McGregor) hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) never makes a move without reason and never holds a shot — or pauses after a line — a millisecond longer than it needs to. You can see it in the scene we’re examining here: The film’s widely celebrated ending, which wraps up two hours’ worth of plot in just four shots.

“The Ghost Writer” is an example of a vanishing type of film direction rooted in the values of classical (pre-TV) Hollywood. Although Polanski didn’t make his first feature until 1962 (“A Knife in the Water“), he has done most of his work in that tradition. The subject matter of his movies is often disturbing — jealousy, insanity, conspiracy, the triumphs of chaos and evil — but his style is usually conservative, with a touch of elegance. He doesn’t cover action with two or three or 10 cameras to produce enough usable footage to create the illusion of comprehensiveness. Polanski more often tries to plan and shoot action from one, maybe two angles, and he doesn’t cut to a new angle unless he can get a better result than by staying where he is. Polanski’s screenwriting sensibility is just as exact — a point vividly demonstrated on “The Ghost Writer,” which Polanski co-adapted with Robert Harris, from Harris’ novel. The filmmaker doles out words the way he doles out shots: sparingly, never giving the viewers more than is necessary to keep them on the hook and waiting for the next revelation. This is a nearly perfect entertainment, never more so than in its final few minutes. 

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Reminder: Roman Polanski fled sentencing

What else is there to say about this case of justice interruptus?

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Reminder: Roman Polanski fled sentencingFILE - IN this French-born film director Roman Polanski waves during a media presentation in Berlin. The Swiss government says it will make an announcement Monday July 12, 2010 about Roman Polanski's extradition to the United States for a 1977 sex case. The government says Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf will hold a news conference in the capital Bern at 2 p.m. (1200 GMT; 8 a.m. EDT) "on the matter of the Roman Polanski extradition decision." (AP Photo/Franka Bruns, File)(Credit: AP)

I just stuttered and “um”-ed my way through a BBC radio interview about Roman Polanski’s new-found freedom. That’s because I didn’t know how to adequately answer the host’s question: What do you make of this news? It might also have something to do with freezing up in front of a global audience of — god, I don’t even want to think about it. Mostly, though, I didn’t know what to say, aside from: “But, but … he fled final sentencing.”

Swiss officials say their ruling was purely technical and hinged on the United States’ refusal to supply a confidential transcript of a hearing with the prosecutor in charge of the case. This should come as no surprise to Swiss authorities: A court ruling barred the release of the requested material. As a result, though, the Swiss say they were unable to “exclude with the necessary certainty” that Polanski had already served his sentence. He was ordered to serve a 90-day psychiatric evaluation and was released after only 42 days, thanks to a favorable review. But even more important: he fled sentencing.

Of course, his supporters point to judicial misconduct — by way of inappropriate communication between the judge and the prosecutor — and argue that the charges should be tossed out as a result. As Brian Palmer explained in Slate, however:

Outright dismissal is an exceedingly rare remedy for ex parte communications, especially when the communications came after the plea agreement was reached. It’s far more common for the plea agreement to stand, with a new judge brought in to preside over the sentencing.

That didn’t happen, though, because Polanski fled sentencing. Did I mention that Polanski fled sentencing? Yeah, Polanski fled sentencing.

It’s amazing how much about this case has to be repeated, again and again — as Kate Harding did with her Broadsheet post titled, “Reminder: Roman Polanski raped a child.” One rarely thinks of child rape as the sort detail that is easily forgotten — not to mention the initial charges of child molestation, rape by use of drugs and sodomy — but so it was in the wake of the director’s arrest late last year. And, once again, I find myself resorting to a single, though different, refrain.

Some are grasping for an optimistic angle, suggesting that the extradition denial might be a good thing for Polanski’s victim, who has voiced her desire for the whole thing to just disappear. As Jezebel’s Anna North pointed out during the BBC segment this morning, it would have disappeared a long time ago if the state of California hadn’t waited over 30 years to actively pursue and settle the case — or if Polanski hadn’t fled sentencing.

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Tracy Clark-Flory

Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter.

Polanski free, Swiss reject US extradition request

The Swiss government refused to hand over renowned film director Polanski to the US

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Polanski free, Swiss reject US extradition requestFILE - In this is Jan. 15, 2009 file photo, film director Roman Polanski looks on in Montrouge, France. The Swiss government says it will make an announcement Monday July 12, 2010 about Roman Polanski's extradition to the United States for a 1977 sex case. The government says Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf will hold a news conference in the capital Bern at 2 p.m. (1200 GMT; 8 a.m. EDT) "on the matter of the Roman Polanski extradition decision." (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)(Credit: AP)

The Swiss government declared renowned film director Roman Polanski a free man on Monday after rejecting a U.S. request to extradite him on a charge of having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl.

The Swiss mostly blamed U.S. authorities for failing to provide confidential testimony about Polanski’s sentencing procedure in 1977-1978.

The Justice Ministry also said that national interests were taken into consideration in the decision.

“The 76-year-old French-Polish film director Roman Polanski will not be extradited to the USA,” the ministry said in a statement. “The freedom-restricting measures against him have been revoked.”

It was unclear if Polanski had already left his Swiss chalet in the resort of Gstaad, where he has been held under house arrest since December.

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