Vague Visages’ The Palace review contains minor spoilers. Roman Polanski’s 2023 movie features Oliver Masucci, Fanny Ardant and John Cleese. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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A review shouldn’t be an advertisement, though in practice they often are. Criticism, as a field, has been softened by its proximity to public relations people, with harsh words spoken seldom between good friends. And so coverage of a film is often taken as an advocacy of sorts — it must be playing into some promotional strategy — but I assure you this isn’t the case here. If The Palace — which all but fizzled out after its Venice premiere last year, where it received the worst reviews of Roman Polanski’s long career — ends up getting any kind of release, I encourage people to watch it through other means, if you’re one of the few compelled to watch it at all. And there are reasons to be intrigued: a once great and important director has rarely been reduced to such pathetic material, especially for what may be their last film, and rarely has it felt so deserved. 

The Palace starts with the awful close-up sound of a balloon being tied, and continues on gratingly from there. It’s New Year’s Eve at the Gstaad Palace, an expensive but surprisingly dowdy hotel in the Swiss Alps, and the uncharismatic hotel director, Hansueli (Oliver Masucci), struggles to keep his repellent and unreasonable upper class clientele happy in the lead up to the new millennium. He insists to his staff that tonight isn’t the end of the world, so to speak, but many of his guests are convinced of a genuinely apocalyptic Y2K and others plan to exploit it to their own financial ends. So, while 1999 might seem like as modern a setting as Polanski can convincingly render at 90 years old, it shares a familiar sense of humming doom with today, at once uncertain and inevitable.

But it would be hard to call the class satire — that is supposedly The Palace’s center — sharp. The film avoids any actual systematic analysis, and so it can only extend beyond the obvious to become contrived.

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For example, John Cleese’s nonagenarian millionaire, Arthur William Dallas III, dies during sex with his wife, Magnolia (Bronwyn James), who is, of course, 70 years younger than him. To be fair to Cleese, though (something I’d usually avoid at all costs), his expression of cold, stiffened pleasure is one of few genuine, if ghoulish, laughs — and Arthur’s wife, of course, wants to inherit his fortune, but to do so, for some obscure contractual reason, she must convince everyone he’s alive until midnight.

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It’s only a cold comfort that The Palace doesn’t share Triangle of Sadness’s ethos of equal opportunity offense when it fails to render the staff with sympathy or humanity — that seems beyond Polanski at this point — but it’s at least less repulsed by them. Though that could just as easily be disinterest of the kind that defines the script, co-written with Ewa Piaskowska and Jerzy Skolimowski, right down to its dismissal of comedic construction. The comic situations never build with complication nor surprise, and there is effortfully little intertwining of the numerous subplots; everything moves obviously and morbidly towards its inevitable end, and viewers are left only to stew in the unpleasantness. 

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Given The Palace’s unpleasantness and the flaccid provocation of the film’s final image, it’s hard not to wonder if the joke is on us. Alexandre Desplat’s score feels as much like an insult as casting both Cleese and Mickey Rourke (as Bill Crush), built solely of the upbeat tropes of comedy film music that would usually accompany Will Ferrell’s antics as an elf lost in New York, or something of that sort. How else are viewers supposed to react to The Palace’s cartoon-like twinkling at the reveal of a [SPOILER]? It feels at least possible because the movie is so clearly driven by spite and little else. 

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When Polanski ups the saturation on cinematographer Paweł Edelman‘s raw, flat images, it’s not to the point of clear stylization, but just enough to paint everything in a queasy hue; he only wants to make them uglier. And only in this way, as an attempt to capture true ugliness, can The Palace be seen as a success: when a bottle of champagne blows the bright yellow wig off of Bill Crush’s head, it’s not delivered with slapstick precision but a grim literalness that’s funny in a morbid, unpleasant way, if it’s funny at all.

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But Polanski sees ugliness as a manifestation of moral rot, and so he feels justified in leering at the worst details of each character’s (and therefore their actor’s) body. Cleese’s barrel chest, both in high-waisted trousers and when stripped bare, and James’ fat pouring over the top of her ill-fitting nightgown seem somehow more detailed, as if shot in a close-up only seen in the mind’s eye. And Polanski has a special contempt for plastic surgery, seen both in Rourke, who is shot in a frankly brutal way, and more pointedly in a group of older women, one of whom the director has tell another that “time stands still for you.”

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Polanski’s cruel gaze doesn’t stop there, as it keeps looking further until it reaches even nominally innocent characters like Bill’s long lost son, Vaclav (Danny Exnar) — who finds his father only to be met with loathing and indifference — and makes them look like idiot bumpkins. There is something darkly intriguing about it, not unlike that morbid urge to look at a dead body, but there isn’t much to see except dull flesh; whatever spirit was once there is long gone and all that remains is a cruel reminder of what’s been lost. 

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Polanski isn’t worth mourning though, certainly not as a man, and maybe not as an artist. With all the surfaces of style, wit and entertainment stripped away, The Palace lays the director’s ideology bare in all its unflinching bleakness and petty emptiness. Polanski clearly agrees with Bill’s philosophical proclamation, nominally about his bank account, that “the whole world is going to be zero, so an extra zero or two… who’s going to notice?” If the world is already wretched and condemned, why not make it a little worse? Why not treat people with cruelty? Why not make a film with an (alleged) abuser and sexual predator like Mickey Rourke?

Esmé Holden (@esmesayss) is a transgender writer and editor based in Manchester, England. She has written for Cinema Year Zero, Little White Lies and Bright Wall/Dark Room. Esmé is obsessed with Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and Bugs Bunny.

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