The Palace: A Polanski as heartbreaking as he is embarrassing (review)
A crazy prank about rich people in the middle of the Y2K bug. A misanthropic glaviot sent from the heights of Gstaad.
Fanny Ardant dancing to “Mambo N°5” by Lou Bega while her diarrheal poodle soils the sheets in her room. Mickey Rourke revealing his bald head after dropping his straw-yellow Trumpian wig. John Cleese offering his young fiancée a penguin, which will soon copulate with a dog… If the idea of seeing these different images with your own eyes provokes a slight, um, repulsion in you (to use a Polanskian word) , we advise you to keep your distance from The Palace, a sinister farce about a handful of ultra-rich people going crazy on the eve of the transition to the year 2000. From a distance, as a large part of the cinema world maintains – the film struggled to find a distributor in France, and ended up getting there at a bargain price. The reputation of Roman Polanski, accused of multiple sexual assaults, does not explain everything: The Palace is objectively damning, heavy-handed, never funny, sub-Östlund, very cheesy in its satire of the nouveau riche vulgarity of Russian oligarchs and worldly freaks who jostle in five-star hotels in the Swiss Alps. It's a film so aggressive, ugly and misanthropic that one could reasonably argue that Polanski intended it as a middle finger. A spit, designed to arouse the anger of the movie-going crowd, the sacrificial act of an author who, as he knows he will not leave the stage amid applause, chooses to encourage boos. From this point of view, judging by the zero points awarded by the unanimous international press, it is a success.
By Roman Polanski. With Oliver Masucci, Mickey Rourke, John Cleese… Duration 1h40. Released May 15, 2024
