Polanski's ragged edges

AT A certain point in his well-researched, decently written biography of Roman Polanski, Christopher Sandford characterizes his subject as "a permanent alien," which is about as good a summary of the director as you are likely to encounter. This is a life that is powerfully marked by tragedies that would have silenced or destroyed a less energetic, less egotistical man. Sandford does his best to achieve a balance between Polanski's achievements as a director and the scarring events of his life, but those shattering occurrences are what drives his book and our interest in it.

Even those who are only casually interested in the movies know what they are. As a child in World War II, Polanski lost his mother to the Holocaust and lived a wandering survivor's life in Poland that left him permanently suspicious of permanence. He was a cold, selfish and sexually avaricious nomad -- an absurdist largely incapable of intimate relationships -- long before he became a movie director of a peculiarly driven and demanding kind.

His marriage to Sharon Tate appears briefly to have settled him, though it did not entirely cure him of his priapic ways. It is impossible to say how that relationship might have worked out had she not been infamously murdered by the Manson gang in 1969.

Eight years later, he was arrested, accused of the sodomizing rape of a 13-year-old girl while (ostensibly) photographing her for a magazine layout about pubescent females. After a serio-comic confrontation with a judge, who saw Polanski's trial as a high road to celebrity, he fled the United States for Paris, and he remains in permanent exile there.

His body of work

One can, of course, "understand" Polanski's predilections. If one's life has been ruled by the workings of cruel chance, a child-woman, so much more malleable, controllable, than a mature woman, would be -- to some at least -- an irresistible temptation. But to understand is not to forgive, certainly not in the sterner reaches of the American heartland. As for Polanski, he remains unrepentant, maintaining that this was a consensual sexual encounter and implying that laws against statutory rape are hopelessly outdated in a world of vastly changed teenage sexuality.

Maybe so. Maybe not. In any case, some of Polanski's supporters argue that artists ought to be subject to different rules than the rest of us. I'm not so sure about that, either. Or about his place in movie history.