»The Palace«: Roman Polanski’s »The Palace«: nonsense from the old master

Snowflakes fall on a grand hotel in the Swiss Alps. The 20th century is coming to an end, New Year’s Eve is approaching and it’s time to party. But a mundane champagne toast with smoked salmon nibbles and Chinese firecrackers would of course be inadequate for the super-rich and super-important guests of the high-end tavern where Hansueli Kopf (Oliver Masucci) is in charge: it takes tons of caviar and World War-proof safes; the boss demands that his subordinates Smiling all day to fulfill annoying special requests.

Roman Polanski is now 90 years old. The widower of Sharon Tate, sex offender and exceptional director, wanted to shoot a film in the Hotel Gstaad Palace in the canton of Bern… because he had been there many times. Gathering a cast of stars is no problem: Mickey Rourke plays a vulgar asshole from America; Fanny Ardant, a lustful French noblewoman who first loves her dog and then the hotel plumber; John Cleese has a particularly rich old fart with a cigar, a weak heart and a super-young lover (Bronwyn James) who has a somewhat complicated marriage contract with him. The former porn actor Bongo (Luca Barbareschi), who everyone in the hotel embarrassingly recognizes, is also at the start. Then there’s a gang of Russian gangsters with dubious suitcases and lots of older women who have experience with plastic surgery.

They all celebrate the Millennium New Year’s Eve in The Palace for different reasons, chase the employees around and are afraid of the “Millennium Bug”: massive problems for existential computer programs would arise due to the change in numbers at the turn of the millennium, which would lead to stock market collapses, accidental nuclear war and the end of the world in general being able to lead. Nostradamus more or less predicted this for the year 2000. We know that the catastrophe is always that things continue as before. Well, all of this could be funny if there was a plot, a clever script. Instead, we are served an erratic mess of mediocre ideas for an hour and 40 minutes. Given Polanski’s age, this may also be a failure of the producers and assistants.

At times one gets the impression that the “Millennium Bug” could turn out to be an uprising of less servile hotel employees and not a cheap apocalypse. None. The film makes itself comfortable in the cliché: the rich are degenerates, the Russians are drunk, most of the employees are dutiful – that’s it. Kitchen drills and party feasts, stupid dialogues and quirky worlds of thoughts of unworldly wealthy people do not make for a clever black comedy. The characters remain flat, the jokes rare, the small ideas unconnected. If you are interested in the decorative, you might want to take a closer look at the hotel’s furnishings, the costumes and the view of the Alps, regardless of the plot. By the way, a night in the cheapest room in the real “The Palace” costs 1,600 Swiss francs.

Back to “plot”: The nasty Mickey Rourke does not recognize his dear illegitimate Czech son from an affair in Prague and his family. The Russians are working for a corrupt ambassador who is worried about his oligarch status because Putin is currently on television replacing Yeltsin as president. John Cleese organizes a penguin for his lover as a wedding anniversary gift. A renowned plastic surgeon (Joaquim de Almeida) has to examine stool samples from a dog whose owner fears for his life because she doesn’t have one herself. After all, Milan Peschel as financial henchman Casper Tell squanders so much of Mickey Rourke’s money that he ultimately falls to the ground.

You can smile two or three times during the film. For example, when Mickey Rourke shoots his wig off his head with a champagne bottle cork. Nevertheless: 50 years after his masterpiece “Chinatown,” Polanski made bland nonsense with “The Palace” for the early evening program on private television – a film that you might want to watch on January 1st if you are hungover.

»The Palace«, England/France/Poland/Switzerland 2023, directed by Roman Polanski. Starring: Mickey Rourke, John Cleese, Oliver Masucci. 100 minutes. The German cinema release was on January 18th.

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