Documentary examines director's darker moments

Roman Polanski is a creepy pedophile. He is also one of the most visionary film directors of the last half-century. Few people seem willing to reconcile these facts, but the new documentary, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," tries.

The result: A fascinating window into the culture of celebrity, which can turn on a dime and render a media darling into a monster, and a look at how a press frenzy can trigger judicial misconduct.

The facts of the case: In 1977, 43-year-old Polanski ("Rosemary's Baby," "Chinatown") met with a 13-year-old aspiring actress to take pictures for a magazine. With the girl's mother's permission, they went off alone, eventually ending up at Jack Nicholson's house in L.A. while the actor was away. Polanski talked the girl into posing nude, gave her part of a Quaalude, and had sex with the disoriented teen.

After pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse, Polanski was held for psychiatric evaluation for 42 days. Just prior to sentencing, he fled bail to France, and remains a fugitive from the U.S.

Director Marina Zenovich begins her tale focusing on the Atlantic divide in how this story was covered. In America, Polanski was depicted as a twisted dwarf who preyed upon an innocent. The European media, in contrast, portrayed the girl as a promiscuous, fully consensual partner.

Polanski is not interviewed for the documentary, which is its greatest weakness. But there is plenty of archival footage of his talking about his case, including his belief that most men secretly desire young girls.

All of the key lawyers do appear in the film, and Zenovich tends to focus on behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering. These testimonies, including words from the victim herself, build a damning portrait of Laurence Rittenband, the starstruck judge who lobbied for the case. Rittenband dithered and wavered, asking journalists their opinion on what sort of sentence he should impose, and even ordered the two lead attorneys to stage sham hearings for the benefit of the cameras.

The portrait of Polanski that emerges is always mesmerizing, if not exactly even-handed.

Zenovich clearly has sympathy for her subject, and that leaks through in reminiscences about how the tragedies in his life shaped him. As a child in Poland, Polanski survived the Holocaust by hiding from the Nazis. And his wife, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered in the Charles Manson killings, an episode that first turned the fickle eye of the media against him.

That Polanski broke the law and fled from its unjust application does not diminish the fact that his contributions to the cinematic arts are breathtaking. That he is a great artist also does not mitigate the fact that he served a mere 42 days of incarceration for drugging and raping a teen.

"Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" shows us two sides of a very dark and complicated life.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

Rating: 3 and a half stars (out of four)

Cast: Roman Polanski, Douglas Dalton, Roger Gunson, Lawrence Silver.

Running time: 100 minutes.

Rated: Unrated; contains language, adult themes and brief nudity.