Setting aside Gore Vidal's unfortunate conflation of rape victim and hooker the other day, it's been a surprisingly quiet week on the Roman Polanski front. And then the jailed filmmaker went and made another futile bail appeal to the Swiss courts -- and the Euro press sent along a snapshot of his less-than-posh Swiss digs. Read on to have a look.
Polanski added an undisclosed sweetener to his original collateral offer of an apartment, electronic monitoring and house arrest; Swiss officials said the offer was not made in cash, but whatever it was, it failed to mitigate their earlier conclusion that Polanski is too much of a flight risk to allow out of a detention facility in Winterthur, about 25 kilometers north of Zurich. More appeals are to follow.
Meanwhile, that facility -- Gefängnis Winterthur -- got its first close-up recently on the photo wires, and the jail's Web site offers the interior view seen below. Not exactly welcoming, but you must admit it beats Roger Avary's "brutalist" encampment in Ventura County by a mile.
On a less ominous note, the head of Switzerland's national film archive insisted that its recent showing of Polanski films is not an act of protest or support for the director, but simply an expression of his importance to filmmaking. Of course. Still, it could be a lot more pointed; at least they're not showing an extended run of the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired like this theater I found just outside Winterthur. Does this version come with a disclaimer about the lying prosecutor?