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
ou 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, the 90-year-old director’s latest production is a ghastly, flaccid hotel farce that starts with a conversation about armageddon and ends with a dog having sex with a penguin.
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,, 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.
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.
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.strops in and out of the action as the volatile Mr Crush, red-faced and blonde-wigged, like a furious Michael Fabricant.
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