“Nobody does it to you like Roman Polanski!” – Tagline for “The Tenant”

To a lot of us, he deserves the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for filmmaking, but Roman Polanski is still best known in the United States as – in Polanski’s own phrase – “an evil, profligate dwarf.” Some of that is because of his darkly puckish public persona, his Polish accent, and his height. Of course, the main reason is that, roughly 30 years ago, the 45-year-old director fled the country in the wake of an alleged 1977 poolside rape-by-drugging of a very underage teenager at the home of the vacationing Jack Nicholson. Jokes like the one about Polanski’s next movie being “Close Encounters of the Third Grade” aside, the details of the case have inevitably remained murky ever since: only two people in the world really know what happened, both of them were stoned and one of them was only 13 years old. Nevertheless, thanks to a superb piece of investigative filmmaking by documentary filmmaker Marina Zenovich, the facts surrounding the case have, at least, become clearer.

In just over 100 thoroughly engrossing minutes, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” manages to tell three separate, but inextricably bound tales. One is the he-said, she-said mystery of just what happened that fateful night in the Hollywood hills between Polanski and young Samantha Geimer; another is the court case resulting from it; and finally the astonishing life story of Polanski – a subject that itself could easily fill several films. It includes a childhood spent fleeing Nazi death camps, and an unlikely, speedy rise from Polish film school to Hollywood’s A-list as a master of psychological horror and suspense. It also includes nearly unendurable tragedy when his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was killed alongside several of her friends by followers of a sad little racist named Charles Manson.

Read the rest at Bullz-Eye.com.