The Palace (Roman Polanski, 2023)

 

Roman Polanski’s The Palace is at once anarchic and exhausted, familiar-seeming while aggressively withholding much fulfilment, let alone closure: its relentless ugliness and complete absence of eroticism jarringly contrasts with What?, perhaps its closest cousin in Polanski’s oeuvre, but one in which its lead actress Sydne Rome was almost constantly completely or partially nude (as if to underline the point, Rome briefly shows up in The Palace too, far less strikingly). The film partially draws its ruined mood from being set on New Year’s Eve in 1999, with some characters believing the Y2K bug will strike and do its worst, others oblivious to it; the film reminds us that it was also the day of Boris Yeltsin’s resignation, providing clips of an impossibly benign-seeming Putin on his first day of succession. The film seems to suggest that the end of the world, or at least this corner of it, might be a proportionate response to humanity’s dreggy state: virtually every wealthy female face (and at least one male one) made grotesque by plastic surgery; one off-putting display of entitlement and obliviousness following another; rampant financial corruption; a degraded focus on petty whims and indulgences. But of course the end of the world fails to arrive, and the same goes for narrative closure: the film’s most intriguing structural element is its open-endedness, perhaps suggesting that one layer of idiocy will always be replaced by another, perhaps implicitly chiding the audience for even hoping to extract superficial clarity from such underlying wretchedness. Still, the point would probably have been better made by more sprightly writing and handling, for example with less focus on human and animal excrement, and with more energetic casting (for instance, the no-longer-funny John Cleese achieves little as an ancient Texan billionaire, although his performance gets more enjoyable once his character dies and starts getting lugged around in the manner of Weekend at Bernie’s).