Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I bet many of you wonder what our ex-President is up to. Turns out, he spends most of his afternoons in the AICN chat room, and occasionally he sneaks off to advance screenings of films like Roman Polanski’s new one, THE PIANIST. I’m going to try to catch up with this film this weekend. In the meantime, here’s Dutch with his take on things...
“The Pianist”
Directed by Roman Polanski (Chinatown) and set in Warsaw, “The Pianist” is a film based on the true-life story of a Jewish piano virtuoso surviving Nazi persecution in the middle of World War II. He finds an unlikely friend in a film mostly free of the melodrama present in most films dealing with the Holocaust.
Adrien Brody plays Wladyslaw Szpilman, who plays the last piano piece on Warsaw radio before the Germans invade in 1939, trying to finish his Chopin performance even as artillery shells hit the radio station. He tries to keep that same detached attitude toward the German occupation. He ignores what’s going on around him as his family tries to cope, but reality sets in as he struggles to meet in public with his Gentile girlfriend and sees the city’s Jews beaten and sullied by the German occupation.
Szpilman, along with his family, is finally herded up into Warsaw’s infamous overcrowded Jewish ghetto, which is walled up by the Germans into a tiny section of the city soon made unlivable by the squalor. The ghetto scenes are full of tragic, gripping imagery as strangers fight for their survival. Still, “The Pianist” does little that other movies dealing with the Holocaust haven’t already done until Szpilman is yanked away from his family, bound for the concentration camps. The film never explores the camps and instead follows Szpilman as he escapes from the Germans, going from safehouse to safehouse with the help of the Polish Resistance, living in hidden rooms and closed closets as he observes the war unfold.
The film explores the loneliness of its protagonist, who is completely dependant on strangers for survival. The safehouses become his prison, where he is not allowed to make a sound, lest he raise suspicion. Thankfully, the Polish resistors are friendly, and at one point he meets his old girlfriend, now married and with child, who is only one of many who help him in the course of the movie, most of whom never sees again.
Later, completely alone and on the run towards the end of the war, he’s found by a German officer, played subtly by Thomas Kretschmann (Blade II), who lets him live in the last days of German occupation. In the unimaginable cruelty of the age, Szpilman is touched by kindness throughout the war, letting him live while so many around him die.
“The Pianist,” although never flashy, can at times be visually striking, showing us the landscapes of death in a city gripped in violence. Szpilman, more than once in the film, is left to fend for himself as he hobbles around the lifeless, eerie remains of the Warsaw ghetto and later Warsaw itself, grim in its empty ruin.
Szpilman can only observe the war from his hiding places. Indeed, the film emphasizes survival over resistance. Seeing the Jewish rebellion in the Warsaw ghetto, Szpilman remarks on its futility as the Germans find and execute the rebels. Later, he sees a wider Polish rebellion start and fail, engulfing Warsaw in flames.
The film keeps the same detached tone of Szpilman’s memoirs, from which the movie is based upon, and is tempered by Polanski’s own memories of wartime Poland, saving it from the excess emotion that films with similar themes suffer from. There’s no sweeping full-orchestra score, only the introspective music of Wojciech Kilar. The film has little need for melodrama—just the casual cruelty of the Nazis is really enough to give the film emotional power (one Nazi answers his own question about why they’re beating up one group of Jews one night. Its New Year’s, he says).
The main character is constantly looking from windows, from keyholes, cracks in the wall, often literally and figuratively kept in the dark as those who help him are forced to flee. He, like so many others caught in the middle of war, is just trying to survive another day, not caring much about the politics or the passions that drive the conflict. I think this is the experience most civilians have when they’re at war. Survival itself can be a heroic matter in such times, and Polanski manages to show this, especially with the drab greys so omnipresent in the latter half of the film.
The film deserves at least an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, although from what I hear Polanski isn’t allowed to set foot in the United States, wanted for statutory rape. It’s easy and tempting to say “separate the artist from the art” and leave it at that, but I understand it if the film doesn’t quite get any Oscar acknowledgement.
That being said, it would be a shame if the movie doesn’t get some honorable mention from American critics when it’s given limited release Dec. 27. “The Pianist” won the prestigious 2002 Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) in Cannes, France, which is given every year for the festival’s Best Feature.
Studio Canal
Dir. by Roman Polanski
148 mintues. Rated R
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As always, RR, thanks for sending this one in, and if the rest of you are in New York or LA, you can see this film starting in limited release today.
"Moriarty" out.
