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6 reviews, 94 user ratings
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| Pianist, The |
by Stephen Groenewegen
"Grace notes"
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Although not strictly autobiographical, The Pianist is a work of great personal significance for director Roman Polanski. It tells the story of a young Polish Jew who survived World War II and the Holocaust. Polanski escaped the Cracow Ghetto through a hole in a barbed-wire fence when he was seven. Leading composer and pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman was one of 20 Jews left in Warsaw when the war ended (at the start, there were 360,000).Szpilman’s memoir, Death of a City (later retitled and re-released as The Pianist), was first published in 1946 and has been adapted by English playwright Ronald Harwood (The Dresser). As played by American actor Adrien Brody (The Thin Red Line, Summer of Sam), with a faultless accent, Szpilman is a sober and composed young man. He continues playing Chopin’s “Nocturne in C sharp Minor” live on air even as the Nazis bomb the Polish state radio station.
Polanski introduces us to the Szpilman family during a series of brisk opening scenes. We experience through their eyes, swiftly and matter-of-factly, the worsening humiliation and persecution of Jews after the German army occupies Poland. Initially forbidden from entering certain cafes, soon Jews are unable to visit public parks, sit on street benches or even walk on the footpath (their place is in the gutter).
Next, they are segregated in a Jewish district. A wall is built around it, shutting them in and a steady supply of decent food and medical supplies out. The precinct quickly becomes a filthy Ghetto. Divisions break out amongst the inhabitants, even as they struggle to maintain their pride and dignity. By 1942, cattle trains packed to suffocation point with Jewish people depart Warsaw on one-way journeys to Nazi “work camps”.
These scenes are haunting and shocking, and Polanski moves through them quickly, aware that we may have encountered this material before. When Szpilman is separated from his family and becomes part of the enslaved Warsaw Ghetto workforce, the random inhumanity of the Nazis becomes almost unbearable to watch. But then The Pianist takes an unexpected turn. The eerie and suspenseful second half follows Szpilman’s attempts to survive in Warsaw after escaping the Ghetto.
There’s an element of banality in Polanski’s theme of music as salvation, but we also witness the drawbacks of Szpilman’s devotion to his art. Music helps Szpilman endure the war by alternately nourishing and torturing him. Forced to live silently, concealed in an empty apartment, he must endure the plodding and childlike strains of a piano through the walls (the musically talentless neighbour of course turns out to be a shrewish Nazi sympathiser). The next safe house contains a piano, but Szpilman can only lift the lid and run his fingers silently over the keyboard - across the road is a German hospital and police headquarters and he daren’t make a sound.
His celebrity as Poland’s foremost concert pianist initially enables Szpilman to work in the Ghetto and later saves his life. People in the underground feel altruistic for helping an artist but others are not above trading on Szpilman’s name for their own ends. It is also his music that grants Szpilman an unexpected chance at survival in The Pianist’s extraordinary final act.
The Pianist is full of haunting images, such as the rake-like, haunted and solitary Szpilman walking amongst a street of bombed-out houses in the snow. There’s also the burnt shell of the Ghetto, vacant windows like the staring sockets of a mask, after the suppression of the Jewish uprising in 1943. Pawel Edelman’s cinematography moves though a palette of greens and ashen greys before taking on a golden glow at the end as Szpilman lives to play in front of an orchestra again.
The Pianist is a large-scale international co-production (French-Polish-German-English) with Germans playing Nazis and English character actors mostly taking the part of Polish Jews (Frank Finlay and Maureen Lipman play Wladyslaw’s parents). Occasionally, the large mélange of nationalities and accents is distracting, but Polanski manoeuvres his enormous cast smoothly. Only one leering Englishman, playing a Judas radio technician, has walked straight off a pantomime stage.
Brody is powerful and affecting as Szpilman - he disappears into the role. It’s not easy to portray this much suffering without begging for the audience’s approval or trying to appear noble. Even though it’s a necessarily reticent performance, it’s impossible to not be moved by this emaciated and ghost-like figure shuffling through the snow.
Polanski handles the powerful, raw subject matter with grace and effectively builds a mounting sense of dread during the first half. The Pianist is remarkably even-handed - it features good and bad Poles, Jews and Germans. You can imagine even a well-intentioned Hollywood film diluting the power of Szpilman’s story by telling it in flashback, interrupted by scenes of Brody in aging make-up talking to his grandchildren.Polanski’s achievement lies in telling a single, personalised story of the Holocaust without losing sight of the wider historical-political context. Despite some of the twists in the story, The Pianist always retains a strong sense of history rather than fiction.
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originally posted: 12/07/02 01:08:17
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
27-Dec-2002 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
06-Mar-2003
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