Hey folks, Harry here... I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm dying to see this movie!!! It sounds sooooo good. Meanwhile, this is taking place at the BRUSSELS FILM FESTIVAL and yesterday in Brussels a Anti War protest was met with violence Click Here To Read, Hope our reporter here didn't get caught up in it or hurt. It should also be noted that this reporter is brutally confrontational about all sorts of things... He could be offensive, you've been warned...
Dear Harry et al,
I had the opportunity to watch the Pianist yesterday while I was in Brussels and thought it was so extraordinary that I had to write and tell you guys.
First of all I have to say that I had low expectations. Although I'm a big fan of Polansk's earlier stuff, his recent work has been pretty useless. Reading about him you get the impression that he's a pretty reprehensible character, not just because of the statutory rape thing, but also seems to be deeply misogynist, extraordinarily egotistical even for a director (his autobiography seemed to me little more than an exercise in self love), a megalomaniac (getting thrown off the set of 'The Double' because his ego was even bigger than Travolta's) and cause he puts his untalented wife in all his movies. He's also a profound pessimist (which to be fair you can't blame him for, if my wife had been butchered by Charlie Manson I'd have a pretty negative outlook on life too) and the thought of sitting through two hours of Polanski espousing the horrors of the Holocaust didn't exactly fill me with joy. Even with the Cannes win I wasn't too keen on seeing it (ever since I forced myself to sit through a screening of Rosetta I haven't had too much faith in the festival judges ñ Goddamn David Cronenberg).
But... I was staying at this hostel in Brussels and a girl I met told me she'd been to see it at a cinema in town and that I had to check it out. She also told me that it was an emotionally draining experience and that when the film was finished the whole audience sat through the entire closing credits in silence. This filled me with the fear that the film would be the Holocaust equivalent of Tim Roth's 'the War Zone', possibly a harrowing account of the concentration camp experience where everybody dies and at the end you feel like you've been cinematically violated by a bitter and angry Pole. I didn't really feel that I needed to see another film about the Holocaust, even one that was considered brilliant. So it was with reservations that I took myself off to the cinema to watch the movie.
I'm so glad I did. It is a masterpiece, easily the best film of the year so far, and possibly one of the best films ever made about the Holocaust (along with Night and Fog and Schindlers List). It doesn't even feel like Polanski, it's a very straight forward film with no self conscious camera movements, no creepy dream sequences, no blurring of the line between reality and fantasy, and no incest. The film is about a Jewish Pianist, according to one character in the movie the greatest Pianist in Poland and maybe the world. He is a confident, suave young man, a bit of a ladies man, who comes from a upper middle class family and loves above all else playing the piano. The film opens with the guy playing for a radio session as German bombs explode outside, marking the commencement of the Nazi invasion. The film depicts him and his family as they are stripped of their belongings and herded into the Jewish ghetto. His family is shipped off to a concentration camp, but he manages to sneak out of the ghetto and is put into hiding by friends in the city. Under Nazi rule any one helping Jews would be executed immediately, so help for the Pianist is given by few and there is the constant threat of betrayal and starvation.
One of the reasons this film works so well is that it reeks of honesty. Polanski himself was a Jew, hiding in Warsaw during the Second World War, and throughout the movie the thought that this really happened and was something of a personal account of a horrific experience was always in the back of my mind. Also, considering Polanski's past, I was constantly aware that the lead character could very easily die at the end of the movie, thus proving Polanski's nihilistic philosophies on the futility of life and the horrific reality of the Holocaust. Like the best lead characters you really like this guy and you want him to triumph in the end, but due to the context you feel convinced that he won't.
This film reminded me of Dancer in the Dark. I hate Lars Von Trier, the dopey fuck, and felt that Dancer in the Dark was blatantly manipulative and sensationalist. Von Trier seemed to want to prove that he could create emotion purely through his directorial powers. It was if he wanted put a sympathetic character through the ringer and then fuck them at the end, just to show how he could manipulate the audience. While everybody else in the cinema cried during the hanging scene at the end of the film, I couldnÃt help laughing out loud. The Pianist works exactly where Dancer failed. The Pianist is totally lacking in pretension. No John Williamsesque score, no heartfelt diatribe by the lead character at the end about how he could have saved more lives, no sacrifice by the protagonist so that others could live, just a profoundly moving story about a good guy in a bad time.
There is one scene towards the end in which the lead character gets the chance to play the piano after being locked away for four years (that sounds positively Spielbergian I know... there's more to it than that, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone). This is one of the most powerful sequences ever put to celluloid. The fact that Polanski can get this guy to play a very sentimental piece of music (which of course is the best way to get an emotional response from an audience) without making it melodramatic or saccharine is a testament to his extraordinary directorial abilities. This film will almost certainly be nominated for best picture and director and could have a good chance of winning.
Not only is this a great film, but the fact that Polanski can come out after making crap for years and produce a wonderful movie gives me hope that other directors who's best days seem to be behind them (like Copolla, De Palma and Friedkin) could possibly come back and make the best films of their careers. And who knows, if Polanski promises not to fuck any little girls they might even let him back into the country for the Oscars.
CraftyChicken
