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The Pianist (2002)
When the film ended, the audience sat still for a long pause before anyone dared move. An eerie silence hovered in the room as if no one felt right about speaking. Slowly people began to file out but that quiet continued. Only as people made it to the lobby did they start to find their voices. The Pianist is so emotionally draining an experience that it is virtually impossible to imagine what it would be like to live through it.
The film is based on the experiences of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew living in Warsaw at the time of the German invasion in World War II. The film opens as he is performing live on a Warsaw radio broadcast, incidently the last live music to be heard on that radio for years. His performance is interrupted as the Germans begin to shell the city. He is warned to stop playing and hide by the technicians but he brushes their suggestions and continues to play. No one would dare interrupt this he seems to be saying. Only when a nearby explosion knocks him from his seat does he stop. And even then on his way out he meets an attractive woman and wants to chat. Szpilman seems to have no fear of the Germans or more accurately, he simply doesn't believe in the danger. His family seems to have a similar feeling. They worry but believe that the British and French will quickly leap to their aid. That false hope quickly gives way to indignation as the Germans start imposing rules barring Jews from certain restaurants, from walking in the park or even sitting on benches. It gets even worse as the Jews are required to wear arm bands, bow to the Germans and walk in the gutter rather than the sidewalk. And then they are relocated to a tiny section of the city and walled in. The Nazis feed them disinformation and simultaneously terrorize them. The Jews are left to tiny bits of rumor and speculation to find hope.
Szpilman, played by Adrien Brody, maintains a certain detachment from it all. He clings to his belief that it will all turn out all right. That improbable belief is all he has going for him. Saved at the last second from the trains headed for the concentration camps, he hides in Warsaw, getting a little help from friends and admirers. Repeatedly forced from hiding, he sinks into worse and worse situations, becoming more ragged and less civilized with each passing shot. Warsaw itself seems to echo this as it eventually takes on the look of bombed out post apocalyptic science fiction tale.
Roman Polanski shoots this film with a remarkably emotionless style. There is no added drama, no flourishes of style, no fancy techniques. The camera doesn't try anything fancy and most importantly, never flinches from the horror. Nazi atrocities and the breakdown of civility are calmly recorded. This blunt approach makes it gut churning experience, one that most audiences will find emotionally draining. Polanski is himself a survivor of the Holocaust and he clearly wants it shown that most Jews who survived this period did so out of luck and perseverance rather than heroism. It's clear that Szpilman survives because he was lucky enough on numerous occasions not to be the one singled out by Nazi troops for execution or torture. Constantly in hiding, Szpilman is often in the position of watching important events from a high window. He suffers watching his countrymen brutally murdered or valiantly fighting for freedom as he is forced to watch helplessly. Polanski puts the audience in the same position, having to watch the worst of what humanity is capable of, all at a distance that increases the feeling of helplessness in the face of atrocity.
Szpilman is depicted as neither a fighter or a hero. He is simply a survivor. This is a man who would never take a life or start a fight. He exists simply to play beautiful music. Scenes where he is allowed to play make for the rare emotional release from the horrors that surround him. One particularly cruel twist of fate has him holed up in a small apartment that contains a piano. You can see how drawn he is to it but to play it would certainly attract attention and thus his own death. As the movie progresses, his music is often the only sign of humanity left in him. It is the one thing that the Germans can't take from him.
This is Polanski's best film in many a year and definitely one of his best ever. It's intelligent and yet harsh in treating a difficult subject in a blunt unyielding manner. Holocaust films are never cheerful and this is no exception but it is probably the most defining one of the period. That alone makes this worthy of your attention.
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