Watch it if you can bear to (The Pianist (DVD))

Member Name: sandrabarber

Product:	The Pianist (DVD)
Date:	13/12/03 (344 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: superbly acted, extermely moving

Disadvantages: harrowing

Watching (and reviewing) a Holocaust drama is an experience of mixed emotions. Can you ? and SHOULD you ? say that you enjoyed it? Are you MEANT to enjoy it, or suffer through it? When you assess it, is it right to comment on its merits as a piece of art, or should the subject matter override all other considerations? I studied Holocaust literature and film at university, and this was a debate we often had. We came to no conclusions. So please excuse me if I seem to come from what to you is an insignificant arty-farty perspective, or if, on the other hand, you think I let the subject take over and cloud my judgement. I find myself in something of a quandary.

The Pianist begins in war-time Warsaw, when the Nazis had invaded and the segregation and punishment of Jews was beginning. It tells the true story of Wladek Szpilman, a Jewish Pole who was a truly magnificent pianist.

Wladek comes from a successful family who live a very middle-class, cultured life. Wladek is intelligent, reasonable, caring and incredibly gifted. He is instantly admirable and likeable, and we relate to him immediately. His family are normal, intelligent, decent people, and their relationship of bickering, discussing, joking and chatting is like many of our own.

But their lives begin to change as new rules and laws against the Jews come into force. First it is the wearing of the Star of David on their arms. Then they are forbidden to walk on the pavements, but must trudge through the gutters instead. Everywhere they go, Nazi officers are looking out for their transgressions, either innocent or deliberate, which they punish with verbal abuse, beatings, and death.

Jewish people?s property and effects are then confiscated, and all Jewish people are forced to live in the crowded, filthy ghettoes. They work for a pittance, if they are allowed to work at all. And incrementally, they are herded onto trains and taken to the concentration camps. This
is what happens to Wladek?s family.

Wladek, however, escapes this latter fate and goes into hiding in a variety of places in highly dangerous non-Jewish Warsaw. He is helped by several gentile Poles along the way, but his isolation and fear is suffered mostly alone. He is starved of company, conversation, his beloved music, and even food.

The Pianist tells the story of one man?s strength, endurance and courage in the most horrendous of circumstances. It also ? by their eerie absence ? tells the story of the Polish Jews. Though we never once venture into a concentration camp, we know that the characters who populated the early frames of the movie are there, and they are never out of our minds.

As the story concentrates on the character of Wladek, mush of the success of the film rests on the central performance of the actor who plays him: Adrien Brody. And Brody gives one of the best cinematic performances I have ever seen.

Wladek is an incredibly difficult role to play, as he is so often alone where he does not talk. Yet Brody manages to convey to us Wladek?s fear, loneliness, despair, anger, loss and confusion. We suffer his mental, emotional and physical pain as he goes through the days of his degraded, shattered life. We share his dread of discovery and feel the almost omnipresence of the Nazi guards as he dares to open a window, take a step or pull a curtain aside.

Other actors in The Pianist include Maureen Lipman, Emilia Fox and Frank Finlay. All give sterling performances, though the honours of course go to Brody who caries the film more or less single-handed.

Director Roman Polanski does not include one scene without Wladek as the main presence, and hence we see and interpret the world through Wladek?s eyes.


Polanski recreates wartime with meticulous attention to detail, and makes very effective use of the dark nights, freezing fog and bone-chilling ice to create tension and danger
, and communicate the overwhelming physical cold that adds to Wladek?s misery.

He also makes full use of silence and noise, jolting us from a silent scene where Wladek is alone and (for the moment) safe to a sudden loud arrival of stormtrooper?s boots, or the sound of machine guns, screaming and staccato German shouting.

Polanski spares us no details of horrific reality. Jews are shot for sport, or for effect, and they are beaten, thrown from windows or tortured. We see all of this, and we see the shot bodies of men, women and children in the streets. We see people starving and degrading themselves for a morsel of food.

Intermingled with the horror, however, are moments of tenderness that lift our hearts, such as when Wladek is helped by people who are risking their own lives to do so, or when his music plays in his head and momentarily transports him to another time and life.

The Pianist is a bleak, horrific and highly disturbing film, but also one of great hope and humanity. Although the images of the horrors I had seen stayed with me long after the film was over, I was also left uplifted and full of admiration for Wladek Szpilman and others like him who triumphed over the evils that were perpetrated against them.

The day after I watched The Pianist I read the Daily Mail. It was full of exaggerated claims about asylum seekers scamming our benefit system. It demeaned their humanity and cast aspersions on their ethnicity. It implied that their suffering was not worthy of consideration. In my opinion, it incited racial hatred just as the early Nazis did during Hitler?s rise to power. It was more subtle, of course ? far more subtle ? but it was there and it disgusted me.

The Pianist is sadly all too relevant a film.

Watch it as soon as you can.

Running time 2.5 hours. Certificate 15. £14.99 at choicesdirect.co.uk.

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