Roman Polanski survived the Krakow ghetto as a child and lost his mother at Auschwitz, and the paranoia in his films has an origin that critics rarely have to guess at. Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant form an apartment trilogy in which domestic space becomes the threat.
Chinatown is the most complete thing he made, a detective story where solving the case makes everything worse, and the ending was his insistence over the screenwriter’s objection. The Pianist won him Best Director in absentia.
He pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old in 1977 and fled the United States before sentencing, and has been a fugitive since. Any account of the films has to sit alongside that fact, not around it.
