France, Poland, Germany, United Kingdom, 2002
Directed by Roman Polanski
With Adrien Brody (Wladyslaw Szpilman), Ed Stoppard (Henryk), Jessica Kate Meyer (Halina), Julia Rainer (Regina), Frank Finlay (Mr. Szpilman), Maureen Lipman (Mrs. Szpilman), Roy Smiles (Itzak Heller), Emilia Fox (Dorota), Daniel Caltagirone (Majorek), Thomas Kretschmann (Captain Wilm Hosenfeld)
History comes as a shock, a terrible explosion interrupting life: as Wladyslaw Szpilman records compositions by Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin for the Polish radio, distant and disturbing booming sounds can be heard before the glasses of the window of the building of the radio and the partition wall of the studio crack up and shards fly away. Nazi Germany has attacked Poland, the start of a six-year long occupation and terror.
The milestones of this ordeal are well-known and give the narrative a clear structure, key dates opening the new sections. In a matter of months after the quick military defeat, German authorities change law to make the Jews second-class citizens who are compelled to settle in a small neighborhood, the Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw. In the course of 1942, in the wake of the Wansee conference held in January near Berlin aiming to give a “final solution” to the so-called “Jewish problem”, many residents of the Ghetto are packed into trains sending them into special camps elsewhere in the German-occupied territories, hellish places from where only a few would return later. The Jews who were kept inside the Ghetto put up an unexpected and truly awesome show of resistance and vengeance in April 1943 but their uprising is crushed by May 1943. In August 1944, the Polish Resistance and Warsaw residents rebel against the Germans; this fresh uprising spark heavy fighting that destroys the city and ends with the evacuation of the population in October. When the Soviet armies set Warsaw free in January 1945, it is an empty and devastated place covered with snow.
These are horrible events, a deeply unnatural turn of History, and are clearly shot that way. Running against the usual sense of reading a text or an image in the West, the camera likes to capture crowds and incidents from right to left. The left stands as the attack, the hurdle, the trap waiting for the Jews, doomed to flow from the right, to be cornered on this side of the frame as their story keeps moving towards a bitter end.
It is hard to forget this vast flow of people slowly spreading from the right to fill a huge, empty and walled place and forced to wait in this weather-beaten square for something to happen; it turns out the wait ends with frontal views of those people put inside carriages made for carrying goods; in a chilling coda, as some dead bodies lie on the ground, the camera shoots the train moving away, from left to right. There is also the wanton cruelty of the occupiers changing the movement: at one point, Wladyslaw Szpilman’s father comes back home with a sack of potatoes, walking on the sidewalk from the left; but he meets two aggressive German officials who call him out; now he must walk back from the right and is met with insults and a slap in the face; when ordered to go, he must walk next to the sidewalk, his body on the right of the screen.
But when a group of Jews working on a construction site leave the place at the end of the workday, quietly throwing above a wall to hide them weapons that have been smuggled to them and they reckon to use when the moment of uprising will come, they move from left to right; resistance is the natural, spontaneous way to react to the disgraceful turn of events; however, it is not always that easy to carry out.
Views akin to what is dubbed as God’s view, taken from high above and showing a broad and flat view of the ground, recur. But they belong to powerless witnesses compelled to watch horrible events; the shot magnifies the sheer horror occupying forces are guilty of, like the night raid against the building facing the one where the Szpilmans live in the Ghetto and which end by a massacre, complete with the throwing off a window of a wheelchair-bound old man. Wladyslaw Szpilman would often be put in this position, watching fighting and killings from a distance that he has no means and no interest to bridge; his survival also mean accepting horror without a dignified possibility to intervene, a deeply uncomfortable and unnerving situation. This is no ordinary life; not even a travesty; but hell, as squarely opposite to peace or life.
As the war lasts and tragedies multiply the light and colors change. Subtly the pictures lose the brightest hues and the screen is eventually drained of any shine and expanses of colors, the light turned dramatically cold, mirroring in a precise and painful way the arc of the city and of the hero, both eventually drained of energy and life – Wladyslaw Szpilman spends days wandering in ruins, hungry, exhausted, ghost-like while the camera cannot capture anything else than dilapidated places and half-destroyed buildings, a man lost amid formidable surroundings.
This is the story of a great artist and kind fellow compelled to deal with the horror and losing everything. The first scene hints at how he is going to lose his job and position inside the society; then comes the downward spiral grabbing his relatives: a father, a mother, two sisters, Regina and Halina, and a brother, Henryk, siblings who put up a greater spirit of resistance and show more anger and defiance than Wladyslaw whereas Wladyslaw himself just gets by and hopes the worst can be avoided. It cannot, and his family is sent to the death camp while he is doomed to a long, exhausting, dangerous fight for survival. He makes it thanks to the extraordinary kindness of strangers.
Sometimes, it is predictable: a clever and determined supporter of the Resistance, Majorek, helps him get through hard work and then out of the Ghetto; in the city, a woman who admired him and whom he loved, Dorota, helps him to hide in apartments. But key supports would come from wholly unexpected corners: Itzak Heller, a Jew who has accepted to lead the Ghetto police force serving as an auxiliary to the Germans, an unpleasant and haughty character who has clashed with Henryk, and yet the man who pushes aside Wladyslaw at the right moment, preventing him to be put on the ill-fated train, for no clear reason; and later, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, a Nazi officer who gives him food and shelter seemingly because he admires the pianist’s artistic skills and for other reasons, perhaps, but then again never to be clarified. The pianist thus survives thanks to supporters of the oppression, wholly illegitimate and unacceptable actors of the new order, suddenly tugged by contrarian impulses – or perhaps just awestruck by the skills of the Jew (but not by his personality). Even deep in the dark, human souls can keep worthy instincts.
Wladyslaw Szpilman did exist; a beloved musician in Poland, he wrote memoirs that are the basis for the film. For years director Roman Polanski refused to direct a film about the plight of Poles and Jewish Poles, but then decided to tackle head-on what is a deeply personal experience: his parents were also sent to the death camps (the father came back, the mother did not) and he had to sleep rough and live in the streets of his war-ravaged homeland.
That does not give the film a stronger emotional tone; sentiments are not hyperbolic or mawkish; they are checked by a faultless and rigorous mise en scène. “The Pianist” is a broad and brutal depiction of the abnormality and unfairness of the war waged by the Nazis and relentlessly shows what it meant on a daily basis, in the most banal circumstances, for ordinary Jews (who do look like ordinary people – the film never describes them through traditions and rituals, and rabbis seem absent; it is their enemy who insists on their cultural idiosyncrasy). The amazing courage and physical effort that survival implies in this distorted world is simply but eloquently conveyed, in large part thanks to the physically demanding, psychologically delicate and genuinely committed performance of Adrien Brody. The real facts allow the audience to be reminded that evil is not always the prevailing force; a slight movement in a new, opposite direction, in the heart, in the mind, in the street, anywhere, can be enough to let life carry on as it should be.