WASHINGTON -- Roman Polanski, the famed film director arrested in Zurich under a U.S. extradition request, has a perverse ability to bring out the worst in the judicial system. He must be thinking that the characters in his legal rigmarole resemble those incomprehensible creatures in his masterpieces who tell us normality does not exist.

This should have been a straightforward case. Polanski was accused of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977, spent a short time in jail, admitted to the charges and entered a plea bargain. But then stuff happened. Backtracking, Judge Laurence Rittenband, a publicity maniac, signaled to Polanski's attorneys that he would not abide by his deal with the prosecutors. By tipping him off a day before sentencing him in 1978, the judge incited him to flee. Polanski, a man who knows a thing or two about the bizarre, did just that.

Rittenband was removed from the case, but his successor, Paul Breckenridge, refused to sentence Polanski in absentia on the grounds that it would have been "idle" because France would never hand him over. He did not explain why the warrant for the director's arrest was not idle on the same grounds.

When his victim became an adult, she reached an arrangement with Polanski -- with the backing of her family, who had initiated the case, she asked the courts to give it up. This made irrelevant the defense's contention that the girl's mother had encouraged the relationship.

Meanwhile, Polanski crisscrossed Europe making movies and winning awards. No effort was made to have him extradited. In fact, the Los Angeles prosecutors themselves told his U.S. lawyers that they were not actively pursuing him.

In 2005, the extradition request was suddenly reactivated. Even then no serious effort was made to enforce it. Polanski continued to move about and visit Switzerland, where he owned a home in Gstaad, a ski town with a dizzying number of famous people per square mile.

The latest attempt to have the case dismissed, partly on evidence of judicial malpractice revealed in a documentary film in 2008, met with a mind-boggling ruling by Judge Peter Espinoza: Polanski had most probably been the victim of judicial misconduct, but the charges stood. None of the elements pointing to the futility of the case -- including a 10-year statute of limitations for the crime -- was apparently persuasive enough. Polanski continued to move in and out of Switzerland without the slightest encumbrance -- until a few days ago when suddenly the United States and Switzerland remembered that justice needed to be done.

To top it all, U.S. prosecutors claim they did not act earlier because this was the first time they knew that Polanski -- whose life rolls before the public eye on a daily basis -- was going to be in Switzerland at a specific time. Swiss officials said they had failed to intervene before because they lacked control of Europeans who crossed their border. The sudden decision by the Swiss government to arrest Polanski on a 31-year-old charge of having sex with an underage girl was at odds with its campaign last year against a ballot initiative abolishing the statute of limitations regarding pedophilia.

In Polanski's movies, the interactions of weird characters often reveal a world in which nothing makes sense. His legal case does no less. Were the ancient charges against Polanski given new life because pedophilia is so sensitive in the United States? Is someone in the L.A. court system considering a political career? Was the Justice Department testing Switzerland in the wake of recent tensions regarding efforts to pursue tax evaders? Is a hidden hand sabotaging relations between the United States and France, where Polanski, a French citizen, is revered? Is someone throwing salt in the wound of the rift between the United States and Poland, already reeling from Washington's decision to scrap a nuclear missile-defense system? Or was the timing an unfortunate coincidence and are these conspiracy theories a risible absurdity?

One is tempted to suggest that Polanski should accept his extradition and face the court, where most factors point in his favor. This would allow the director to re-establish a relationship with a country he admires and where he has as many friends as he does in Europe. And yet he would be taking a huge gamble because nothing in his case is ever logical or normal. And the last thing you want, if you are Polanski, is for the film of your life to end like so many of the lives in your films.