You may need a stiff drink to get through the entirety of Roman Polanski’s new film; you may find you need several – whatever dulls the pain. Playing out of competition at the Venice film festival, the 90-year-old director’s latest (last?) production is a ghastly, flaccid hotel farce that starts with a conversation about armageddon and ends with a dog having sex with a penguin. As grand finales go, The Palace’s closing shot is as memorable as “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown”, or the slow swoop from the Dakota at the end of Rosemary’s Baby. But – and I can’t stress this enough – not in a good way.
It’s too easy to say that Polanski’s a spent force, a pale shadow of the prodigiously talented film-maker of the 1960s and 70s. His previous picture, 2019’s An Officer and a Spy, was sturdy and worthwhile, an impressive period procedural that picked at the scabs of the Dreyfus affair. But The Palace is horrible: tacky and joyless, fatally confusing sexual disgust with arousal. It’s clear that Polanski is revolted by the world and the people he shows us here. But tellingly, his film is not a satire; it’s more like the giggling wallflower at the worst party in town.
Is it a spoiler to have mentioned The Palace’s final shot? I don’t think that it is. One, because the film has comprehensively spoiled itself by the time it arrives and two, because that closing image is cheap and incidental. The plot doesn’t actually concern the extended will-they-won’t-they courtship between a bird and a dog. On balance, it might have been more interesting if it had, instead of cavorting like a drunk alongside the millionaire guests at a luxury Alpine hotel. It’s New Year’s eve, 1999 and the Y2K virus is about to break. Fanny Ardant’s pooch has just taken a dump on her sheets and Hanseuli Kopf (Oliver Masucci), the harried manager, has his work cut out. He’s pinballing from the penthouse suite to the kitchens, shouting such lines as, “Has everyone in this hotel gone insane?”
Should you ever take a wrong turn and wind up at the Palace, for heaven sake don’t check in. The decor is that of a modish 60s comedy that’s been left to moulder for too long in the cellar. The guestlist, moreover, is a veritable cast of the damned. John Cleese plays Arthur Duncan Dallas III, a supposedly 97-year-old Texas plutocrat, here on vacation with his 22-year-old bride. Mickey Rourke strops in and out of the action as the volatile Mr Crush, red-faced and blonde-wigged, like a furious Michael Fabricant. Adding to the Eurotrash vibe, Polanski also throws in a well-hung porn star called Bongo and a plastic surgeon, Dr Lima, who has worked on the faces of at least half the guests. The fixed rictus grins of these people, I fear, are just about the only smiles this dismal comedy can muster.
On-screen the clock is ticking towards midnight. The soused millionaires are now falling face-down in the caviar, vomiting over limousines and urinating on the Christmas lights. Off-screen, meanwhile, the punters inside the Venice cinema have already started to break for the doors. They reel out one-by-one; it’s as though they are running for their lives. This means they miss the fireworks and Cleese’s tragicomic exit in a wheelchair. It also means they’ll have missed that throwaway final shot; a contemptuous last curtsey from the one-time master film-maker, delivered to rows of empty seats.
• The Palace screened at the Venice film festival.
