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The Pianist
***1/2
Cinema
Reviews - Week of January 24, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. UK/
France/ Germany/ Poland/ Netherlands. 148 minutes. Directed by Roman Polanski.
Written by Ronald Harwood; based on the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman. Starring
Adrien Brody, Emilia Fox, Michal Zembrowski, Ed Stoppard, Maureen Lipman,
Frank Finlay, Jessica Kate Meyer, Julia Rayner, Wanja Mues, Richard
Ridings.
Before the enormous success of "Schindler's List",
and perhaps to some extent even now, it was widely thought that the Holocaust
was not a fit subject for filmmakers. "Everything that touches the event
defies the imagination," said Nobel laureate Elie Weisel. "In this domain,
art is doomed to fail." Maybe this is because survivors knew there was no
correct way to translate the events they witnessed into the conventional
rhythms of drama. From what I've seen, the most powerful communications of
the Holocaust are those that don't feel like they're trying to move us. They
portray mundane slogs, sometimes interrupted by chaos and violence -- evil,
terror and disbelief do not need to be shown through obvious devices, but
hang over everything by implication and context.
That's what Roman Polanski does with "The
Pianist", which has been internationally heralded as the director's
return to form. His best previous films have been notable for extreme stylistics
-- think of the grotesque colours of "Rosemary's Baby", the genre trappings
of "Chinatown". Here he looks back on those places he saw at childhood, and
captures them by freeing them from artefact, and by showing them heartbreakingly
drably.
The film is based on the memoir of Wladyslaw Szpilman,
a pianist who worked on Krakow radio in the late 1930s. He lived with his
family in Warsaw, and then in the Warsaw ghetto, and when his brothers, sisters
and parents were being loaded onto the trains for concentration camps, he
was pulled out of the line by a guard. He didn't want to leave his family,
but nor did he want to struggle too hard to be shipped to his death, so he
avoided Auschwitz and served as one of the last ghetto workers, before fleeing
back into the city and surviving through little more than evasion and
instinct.
"The Pianist" stars Adrien Brody as Szpilman,
in an agonising performance for which he not only lost weight to the point
of becoming a skeleton, but has to show mainly through body language the
torment, the danger, the physical wearying and sheer tediousness that hiding
from the Nazis involved. The movie is remarkable not only for the scenes
where Brody is on his own, but also in the build-up, where he and his family
are just citizens going about their business, noticing the introduction of
Jewish rules that gradually get more restrictive. This is not a story about
politics or wider context -- it's seen from the ground, and the occupying
government is some mad, distant force, personified only by boy soldiers whose
baser instincts have been let loose by regulations that encourage
them.
Wladyslaw Sziplman does not have the most heroic
story of Holocaust survivors -- his actions were borne of self-interest,
and he was too busy creeping behind windows and keeping his head out of sight
to have had the opportunity to do anything courageous. This is not a detriment
to the material, it is a strength. The Holocaust happened to regular people,
who did not know it was coming, and certainly not how or when. If today the
American government used the Patriot Act to invade your country and round
up your neighbourhood, as it probably has the power and influence to do,
would you feel a part of history, or more like a lost soul in panic? Brody
plays the part of an artist and an observer, and we, sitting comfortably
in our arthouse cinemas and looking in horror at the screen, sympathise with
his helplessness rather than smugly judge his decisions. We're forced to
recognise that the Nazis not only caused a lot of physical harm, but got
their victims into situations where heroism was impossible.
This is a movie of plain, sullen sounds, and
photography overcast by dullness. It's about crawling through the rubble,
feeling powerless, and never being able to tell when the bad guys are going
to find a way to get you. It has been described as the story of a man triumphing
over adversity through his craft, but that just isn't so. Szpilman experiences
release when he plays the piano, because it summons better days and serves
as a reminder that beauty can exist. It does not redeem the wrong that was
forced upon him and his family, or give him a higher purpose. In that domain,
art is doomed to fail.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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