Roman Polanski’s finest film for decades has already won numerous awards
– including Best Film for 2002 at both the National Society of Film
Critics in the United States and the Palme D’Or at Cannes. It is certainly
a film of considerable artistic merit, empowered as it is by Polanski’s
vivid direction, a sort of conscious dissemination in celluloid of his
own wartime memories, ones he has largely refused to talk or write about
until now, and by Adrien Brody’s stunning portrayal of the pianist Wladyslaw
Szpilman, a performance a world apart from his last major role as a
spike-haired punk in Spike Lee’s corrosive Summer of Sam.
Based on Szpilman’s own memoirs
published in Warsaw in 1946 – and, therefore, along with Primo Levi’s
If This Is a Man, one of the most contemporaneous accounts
of the German occupation of Europe – the film is a sparing indictment
of one individual’s story of survival. The book is a harrowing masterpiece
of almost unbearably restrained honesty, so much so that Szpilman never
looked at it again; it is an interpretative emotion which Polanski sees
fit to partly remove from his own vision of the Ghetto where the honesty
is anything but restrained. Polanski’s vision is simply searing in its
white-heat anger.
Whilst Szpilman’s account of the
Ghetto is intensely autobiographical, almost telescopic, and necessarily
limited in what it can describe, Polanski’s interpretation of events
is more panoramic and more bitterly devised. Thus, as the Ghetto is
being built like a citadel within the walls of Warsaw (time, which moves
so quickly, but so naturally, throughout the film’s 145 minutes, necessitates
us seeing the beginning of the wall one moment with a later shot, just
seconds apart, showing it complete with barbed wire) Polanski inflicts
on the viewer a picture of German brutality Szpilman can only have been
a part witness to. A Jew complains that it is cold so he is made to
dance by a German soldier, for example. There are countless executions,
for so meaningless a reason and so randomly undertaken, as to make Spzilman’s
own survival all the more incredible. In another scene, from within
the Ghetto, Szpilman’s family are witnesses to a raid on a flat opposite
where a wheelchair-bound man is thrown from the balcony onto the street
below. Yet, Polanski also focuses on the meanspiritedness within the
Ghetto; a woman is robbed of her gruel by another Jew, only for it to
spill onto the filthy cobbled street, where it is hastily eaten as the
woman dissolves into tears and hysterics.
The film is neatly circular in the
sense that it begins and ends in the same place, and with the same music.
It was on September 23rd 1939 that Szpilman was playing for
Warsaw Radio Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp minor when German shelling
interrupted the broadcast; six years later, he opened his first post-war
broadcast with the same piece. Music – which Polanski uses so effectively
to bridge the gap between barbarity and a nether-world civilization
partly suspended – proves yet one more reason why Szpilman survived
his incarceration in Warsaw when so many died.
He is at first rescued from the
Treblinka death train by a Jewish policeman simply because of his fame
as a pianist and he is later fed by the producer at the radio station
through generous donations given to secure Szpilman’s confinement in
safe houses throughout the city (although Polanski’s suggestion is that
Szpilman was allowed to contract jaundice through neglect). Hearing
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata being played in the house in which he finally
seeks refuge in the most war-torn part of Warsaw he leaves his attic
to be confronted by a German officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, beautifully
played by Thomas Kretschmann. Hosenfeld proves Szpilman’s last saviour
after Szpilman has played Chopin for him, subsequently bringing him
food and blankets and even giving him a German top-coat – which when
the Russians reach Warsaw almost costs Szpilman his life because he
is assumed to be German.
Polanski brings a couple of beautiful
musical touches to his characterisation of Szpilman. The second flat
in which Szpilman must spend his solitary captivity houses a piano yet
all he can do is hover his fingers above the keyboard. When asked by
Hosenfeld what he does Szpilman replies "I am a pianist…I was a
pianist." When asked to play for him, the playing is at first tentative
but then becomes incendiary as if Szpilman is rediscovering his art.
The Pianist will naturally
evoke comparison with Spielberg’s epic Schindler’s List, a film
which Spielberg had asked Polanski to direct for him (he refused). Both
are very different films – not least because it would be a mistake to
call The Pianist, as some critics have, a ‘Holocaust film’. The
Holocaust in this film is very much implied with no exterior or interior
shots of any concentration camps until the very final scenes where it
is not the Jews who are incarcerated but the Germans, among them Szpilman’s
final saviour, Hosenfeld. Moreover, Polanski’s film is almost unique
in the genre by giving us a highly individual view of a universal event.
When Szpilman’s family are deported to Treblinka the very last we see
of them is when they are forced onto the train in Warsaw – although
Polanski makes us aware through nothing other than the tension of the
scene that their fate is never in question. That we are also a part
of Szpilman’s own escape from fate, and their inevitable death, gives
Polanski’s film a parallel sense of epic stature and intimacy, something
lacking in Spielberg’s tour de force.
Notably, it is the music that sets
these films poles apart. John William’s worthy, and Oscar-winning, score
for Schindler’s List bears all the hallmarks of an innate Jewishness,
as much an emblem of the film’s action as the action itself; in contrast,
Wojciech Kilar’s understated score, with its Bergian, almost brittle
tonality (and so often recalling the string quartet rather than an overt
orchestration) makes the horror of Polanski’s vision all the more powerful.
It is that very understatement which makes Polanski’s film all the more
difficult to watch and so uncompromising.
The acting is uniformly excellent
with the brilliant Brody giving us a performance of the highest quality.
Physically, his transformation from a healthy, pre-War pianist to a
ravaged human being scavenging amongst the iced ruins is masterfully
done. Stalwarts of the British screen – Frank Finlay and Maureen Lipman
– play the Szpilman parents with compassion and understanding. But it
is Polanski’s part dispassionate, part fiery direction which leaves
the greatest impression. The sense this is such a personal journey –
as was Spielberg’s – gives the film a stark, dual intimacy. It would
be very hard to think of a finer piece of cinema this director has done,
or which the viewer will see this year.
Marc Bridle
The Pianist’s theatrical release in the United
Kingdom is on 24th January 2003. The film has just opened
in the United States.
Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir is published by Phoenix
priced Ł7.99.
Readers with Quick Time can view a trailer for
the film here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/the_pianist-trailer/