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The Pianist

2001, Movie, R, 148 mins

The Pianist: Review

PIANIST, THE
starstarstarstar
After two decades of aborted projects and mediocre films, Roman Polanski returns to form with an adaptation of Polish composer and pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's autobiography, a powerful evocation of life in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Warsaw, 1939: Szpilman (Adrien Brody, in a career-defining performance) is playing Chopin for a live Polish radio broadcast when a blast from a German bomb shatters the studio windows. The Luftwaffe is bombing the city, and an unforeseeable nightmare has begun for Szpilman, his parents (Frank Finlay, Maureen Lipman), his two sisters (Jessica Kate Meyer, Julia Rayner) and his brother (Ed Stoppard). It unfolds with frightening rapidity: The Nazis' entrance into Warsaw; the mandate requiring all Jews to wear armbands bearing the Star of David; the relocation of the city's 360,000 Jews into the newly established Jewish district, where disease, starvation and Gestapo brutality soon take their toll. Unlike the rest of his family and most of their ghetto neighbors, Szpilman manages to escape deportation to a concentration camp, his life saved by a hated Jewish collaborator (Roy Smiles). But left behind in the nearly empty streets, Szpilman's tour of hell among Warsaw's living dead is just beginning. This is the first film Polanski has made in his homeland in over 40 years and the first in which he deals directly with the horror that befell Poland during the Nazi occupation. Polanski himself escaped the Krakow ghetto at the age of eight, shortly before it was liquidated; like Szpilman, Polanski found shelter with sympathetic Catholics while his family wound up in the camps. An uncompromising vision that seems terrifyingly real — children are beaten to death in the streets, old men thrown out of windows and families are hunted and shot like animals — much of the film's dark power lies in Polanski's willingness to explore what fear and terror bred in the victims of unrelenting persecution. Many die heroically behind the brick walls of the ghetto, but not everyone acts nobly: Alongside Jewish heroes who organize the courageous 1943 uprising stand profiteers who made fortunes on the black market and Jewish collaborators who helped the Gestapo round up their neighbors. Awarded the coveted Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Festival, Polanski's film is an unqualified success both dramatically and artistically — Pawel Edelman's cinematography is extraordinary, and the emptying of the ghetto and its haunting aftermath must surely rank among the most powerful sequences in recent cinema. (In English and German, with English subtitles.) leave a comment --Ken Fox
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