Set in a hotel on New Year’s eve in 1999, this dismal comedy finds room for John Cleese, Mickey Rourke and Fanny Ardant, but you’ll want to run for the hills
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.
