The Pianist

by Shari L. Rosenblum

The musician silenced is among the most poetic of metaphors for genocide, for the losses wrought by the barbaric perversities of hatred made all powerful. The persistence of music, even under the din of warfare and the shadow of horror, is a perfect allegory for endurance and the will to survive. In The Pianist, Roman Polanski's cinematic translation of one man's memory of survival in Warsaw, both these evocations are made flesh in the body of the young Jewish man whose rendering of Chopin's Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor was the last live music broadcast from Polish Radio before the German bombs shut it down in September 1939, and the first piece he played six years later when the war was over and broadcasting recommenced.

But more than metaphor or allegory, Polanski's film is above all a witness's tale. Not a historical recounting, but an inside account told by someone whose very survival has left him somewhere outside of it. And every scene, whether of exposition or movement, pulses with experience. But there is no editorializing. We see what Szpilman saw, what Polanski saw, and there is no audio or cinematic comment upon it. No melodrama, no pulled tears. None is necessary. The images convey more in their starkness.

Adapted by Ronald Harwood (The Dresser) from Wladislaw Szpilman's just-post-Holocaust memoirs, and directed as if conducted by Polanski, who was himself a child in Poland in those years, The Pianist conveys with the precision of a fine instrument the benumbed authority, the detached candor of one who has witnessed the unimaginable, trying at once to speak the unspeakable and to rid himself of its echoes. It is a voice swallowed in uncontainable anger still struggling with its own disbelief.

We open on Szpilman (Adrien Brody) at the piano in the radio station. The bombing has begun, and people are running, but Szpilman keeps playing, defiant, determined. When the explosions intrude upon him and force him to stop, he walks away with an easy gait, and takes the time to make the acquaintance of a woman who catches his eye before heading home to his worried family.

And then Poland surrenders and the absurdity begins. The slow and steady segregation of the Jews from Polish life made palpable in the Szpilman family's day to day existence. Limited in the money they're allowed to hold (where to hide the rest for when this is over), forced to wear armbands (asking, incredulously, do we have to make them ourselves), barred from restaurants and parks, from the benches and the sidewalks of the city, and then removed from homes they'd built and paid for and crushed into the ghetto, nearly half a million in an area of 1.3 square miles bricked in-- a prison of sorts, a sadist's playground. And then the food gets scarce, and the disease goes rampant. And then the deportations begin.

Rather than show the events in their enormity, from above or in retrospect, Polanski gives them to us as they came about, the inconceivable made commonplace at at a most deliberate pace. It takes them little by little, piece by piece: selling books on the streets, playing music in the profiteers' cafe, the will to resist acted out in moments, with flashes of promise that "all will be well," as the Szpilman family assures themselves when they hear that Britain and France have joined the war against Germany, as they still cling to later on, waiting for the cattle cars, spending their last zlotys for a caramel to split among the six of them -- two brothers, two sisters, mother and father -- a sweet hope against hope, sweet faith against proof, that cooperation will save them.

There are no scenes of death camps in The Pianist. Szpilman -- without his family -- escapes that fate, and so his story takes us elsewhere. Through the claustrophobia of underground resistance, the aloneness of hiding, the uncertainty of reliance on strangers, and the arduous overwhelming silence demanded for safety (this last made palpable most particularly in a scene in a hideout apartment, where Szpilman, warned to avoid noise at all costs, imagines his fingers playing Chopin's Grand Polonaise just above the piano's keys).

The film does not explore the Szpilman character -- it gives us only what we can infer from his writings -- sensitivity, assurance, resilience -- and Brody imbues his performance with a self-possession, if not cockiness, that he can temper, and then let dissipate, as history unfolds. It is a masterful undertaking, and one he keeps exceedingly real.

We come to see the cost of Szpilman's survival as another form of segregation -- disconnectedness -- removal from life so as to keep on living -- watching from afar that which is happening all around him: mundanity, cruelty, death, loss, resistance (he watches the Germans surprised by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from the distance of a window in the German part of town just as his family in the Ghetto had witnessed from their window German soldiers throwing a Jewish man in a wheelchair off a balcony because he didn't stand to greet them). Even amidst the destruction -- the Warsaw landscape, after the war, demolished and barren -- he is an observer.

The isolation of the escapee, the observer in face of the evil that men do, Germans, Poles and even Jews, themselves, seeking another form of escape, becomes so much a part of reality that in the end, it is humanity, kindness, that strikes as inconceivable. So that when a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann) comes upon Szpilman in hiding near the last days of the war, gaunt and shrunken in his clothes, unshaven and beastlike, trying to open a can of pickles, we can only anticipate horror.

But what we anticipate is not always what we get. And in the end, as in the beginning, there is Szpilman, with a smile less easy, but no less engaged, and still alive, then (as he once was asked). Still alive. The music and the musician. Endurance and victory.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene