Democratic License by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

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protesters and police out in the streets. Two weeks prior, the French academy’s board of directors resigned in scandal.

So the fact that Polanski’s 2019 film has yet to find US

distribution is not a particular surprise; the fact that his follow-up, “The Palace,” has had similar tough luck in his home country of France more or less suggests a genuine bombshell.

More to the point, the director’s changing circumstance feels directly relevant to the cast he could assemble for this humorless black comedy, and to the build of unyielding grotesquery that makes the film feel like a giant middle finger to the world.

Democratic License Page 135

On paper, the formula is tried and true. Here is another “Rules of the Game,” a caustic skewering of the 1%, split between the pampered brutes who sodden a luxury dwelling, in this case a hotel, and the beleaguered staff forced to clean up. You’ve checked into “The White Lotus,” you’ve traversed the “Triangle of Sadness,” but you’ve never heard the same song in such a shrill pitch as in “The Palace,” wherein it is not only the oft reviled 1% who are skewered. So are the co-operative, complacent other 99%, a full oppressive democracy, the underlings have learned to love. Nor will you mention it, at least not legally in the EU, and borderline in the populist leaning people of the USA, for “reasons,” supposedly relevant to the liberal jewish chat bot dominated “social” media sites, who strive to indoctrinate the uneducated deplorables with properly “fact-checked” enlightenment. Edmund Goulding’s 1932 “Grand Hotel” and Jean Luc Godard’s 1963 “Contempt” reached “shrill” pitches of their own, but were distributed in the US, and have subsequently blessed some greatest films lists. That their existence predates the sensitivities of the 2020’s shrill “culture police”

must have been some help.

The entirety of the main stream critic club have called “The Palace” Polanski’s worst, unfunny, poorly filmed, and pointless.

Isn’t that surprising how they can agree in this case?

Democratic License