Roman Polanski is an unmissable author in the history of cinema. From the short films in Poland, where he is from, and where he directed the magnificent first film “The Knife in the Water”, to the titles in England, “The Alley” and “Repulsa”, and in the USA, the classics “Chinatown” and “ The Devil’s Seed”, Polanski has a trail of works that will forever remain in the collective cinephile memory.
If his universe is almost always darker, like “The Pianist”, in which he revisits a war he still knew, his forays into comedy, like “What?” or the brilliant “Please don’t bite my neck”.
Thus, this new work of his is not at all unexpected, which may or may not be his last – he has reached 90 years of age – and in which, thinking of himself as an artistic testament, he carries out a devastating reckoning with a society that has not even He always treated him as he should.
“The Hotel Palace”, which debuts in Portuguese theaters this Thursday, is inspired by the hotel in the Swiss Alps, near Gstaadt, where Polanski has a home, and where many of his friends stay when they visit there.
In the film, we are on New Year’s Eve from 1999 to 2000, and the guest fauna, which also includes a real penguin, a group of Russian mobsters, a former porn actor, a French marquise, an American with a plan to take advantage of the announced “millennium bug” to become a millionaire and also a famous plastic surgeon.
The latter is inspired by the real Dr. Ivo Pitanguy and allows the Portuguese Joaquim de Almeida to act opposite Fanny Ardant, already with some connection to our country, and share the poster with other well-known figures such as John Clesse or Mickey Rourke.
The eschatological catalog is complete, the bad taste is assumed, the enjoyment of the evils of age and death is so evident that it can only be deliberate and targets not only a certain aristocracy that lives completely outside the problems of ordinary mortals. , as it ultimately applies to the entire human condition.
Only someone of Roman Polanski’s age and talent could be allowed such audacity.
