The Pianist

This is an interesting development in Holocaust representation. It echoes the work of documentary film-maker Mira Hamermesh who, after years successfully depicting stories of domestic and societal conflict, returned to the film she evidently always needed to make, Loving the Dead (1995), the story of the film-maker's own journey back to the Jewish cemetery in Lodz, central Poland, to find the grave of her mother, lost to her for over fifty years. It also sits within the growing number of films that continue to explore Holocaust narratives, themes and representations, including the forthcoming Max where John Cusack plays a friend of a pre-megalomaniacal Adolf Hitler in Vienna in the early 1920s. As Jonathan Freedland has written (The Guardian, G2, 10 January), it appears that our interest in such issues and their appearances on the big screen will increase not lessen, much as the light from an ever-receeding distant star holds our fascination more and more.

Polanski's own film begins with 30 seconds of archival footage, black and white images of Warsaw streets. One suspects that this is held to be necessary in order to establish credibility and the location in history without the need for a 'based on a true story' legend. It is noteworthy in that such scenes could quite easily have been filmed anew given the exacting detail of production design depicting Warsaw throughout the film, evidence of a great reliance upon location shooting.

Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is introduced playing a piano recital on Warsaw Radio. Despite the bombing that has just heralded the onset of war, Szpilman is reluctant to leave his music. This apparent inability to appreciate the dangers around him, a reference to the disbelieving attitude of many middle-class Jewish families throughout the 1930s, is echoed later by his unwillingness to leave Warsaw when the rest of the family prepares to, and the interruption of his work on the part of his sister Dorota (Emelia Fox) with news of further injustices against the Jewish population. Polanski thus presents Szpilman as marginal to the 'action', as witness to the unfolding atrocities and therefore in a spectatorial position in collusion with the film's audience.

These opening scenes, however, are impaired by a wooden script that functions as a brief history lesson of the escalating threats to the Jewish community. All too often, Szpilman's family share news of developments through reading out loud from newspapers, evidently useful to impart information to the audience but at the cost of verisimilitude (unlike Istvan Szabo's excellent Sunshine (1999) when the whole family gather around the dining-room radio to hear a Nazi address and where the family's comments of incredulity and fear are entirely believable). These problems are exacerbated by the need to shoot the film in English, ostensibly to secure international distribution, and yet to insist on a whole variety of questionable accents from the usual ham-German officer to Maureen Lipman in the role she has probably always coveted - the Jewish mother with many an oy vey. However, Frank Finlay gives a superb performance as the father whose family is being destroyed and whose mastery and control of the central scene of the family's last shared meal, a single caramel sweet shared between six adults, is poignant and effective without being overly sentimental.

The film really takes off with Szpilman's initial rescue by a Jewish police officer as his family and thousands of other Jews are herded onto trains for deportation to death camps. Szpilman's years of hiding and dependant survival begin and we follow his safeguarding and betrayal as he seeks to live undetected under the noses of the occupying Nazi forces. But rather than a dry cataloguing of events, Polanski uses the one prominent directorial flourish to pull Szpilman/Brody right into the centre of the drama and with him, the audience: during heavy fighting around a block where he has been hiding, a tank shell slams into the flat, blowing a hole open to the sky - the temporary deafness affecting Szpilman is shared by the film's audience as a deep piercing sound breaks from the confines of the diegetic space and envelopes the auditorium. This bravura move, an echo of an event that Polanski himself experienced, provides for full identification with Szpilman - from now on he is firmly the vessel through which 'we' enter this history.

Having shared in the pain and fear of the sounds and sights of war, the cold and hunger of Szpilman's tortured hiding are faithfully represented. It is here where Brody's performance becomes increasingly demanding and thoroughly succeeds in depicting the almost natural and organic manner in which humanity becomes stripped away in conditions of such deprivation and fear. It is to the actor's, and the director's, credit that by the final sequences where Spzilman is discovered and subsequently kept alive by a German field officer (played by Thomas Kretschmann) that the abyss between the de-humanised Jew and the all-powerful Nazi is tangible and disconcerting in the way it has been re-presented as the natural order of things. This section of the film is not only effective in its own right, with Szpilman managing to save his life and, more profoundly, insist on his triumphant humanity by playing a Chopin piece on the grand piano in the derelict house of his discovery; but is also interesting in that it joins a number of recent Central European films that centre on Jews hiding throughout the war and being made safe by benevolent gentiles, for example the excellent Keep Away From the Window (2000) and the much-praised Divided We Fall (2000). In reclaiming his identity as a pianist, a Jew, a cultured and educated European, Szpilman, and vicariously Polanski, here testifies to the strength of the human spirit, a much-clichéd phrase but as such beautiful music is used so little throughout the film, we are reminded of that which war and brutality keep hidden but cannot destroy.

On winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2002, Polanski's film was criticised in some quarters for a lack of innovation and while this is true to a certain extent, it is one of the film's great strengths that Polanski plays it so straight, echoing Szpilman's own memoirs, written immediately after the war and then set aside for decades, which document this history with little unnecessary melodrama. The restraint of Polanski's direction is to be commended, especially as one considers that actual events were undoubtedly too horrific for mainstream cinematic consumption, and that where the director could make a real impact, he did; the shot of Szpilman dwarfed in the centre of a devastated Warsaw is worth the entrance money alone. Though not faultless, The Pianist does get stronger throughout and in the continuing climate of Holocaust denial, the threat of the loss of memory and passing of remaining survivors, and new political relationships across Europe, it stands as a proud and stark reminder that these horrors happened, and they happened like this.

Reviewed by Yoram Allon