11/17/2023 0 Comments Convertilla reviewAlmost all of the Jews involved in the Holocaust were killed, so all of the survivor stories misrepresent the actual event by supplying an atypical ending. Perhaps that impassive quality reflects what Polanski wants to say. Some reviews of "The Pianist" have found it too detached, lacking urgency. I will not describe what happens, but will observe that Polanski's direction of this scene, his use of pause and nuance, is masterful. The closing scenes of the movie involve Szpilman's confrontation with a German captain named Wilm Hosenfeld ( Thomas Kretschmann), who finds his hiding place by accident. By now it is near the end of the war and the city lies in ruins he finds some rooms standing in the rubble, ironically containing a piano that he dare not play. Szpilman is safe enough here for a time, but hungry, lonely, sick and afraid, and then a bomb falls and he discovers with terror that the running water no longer works. On giant sets he recreates a street overlooked by the apartment where Szpilman is hidden by sympathizers from his high window the pianist can see the walls of the ghetto, and make inferences about the war, based on the comings and goings at the hospital across the street. The film was shot in Poland (where he had not worked since his first feature film, "Knife in the Water," in 1962), and also in Prague and in a German studio. Steven Spielberg tried to enlist him to direct " Schindler's List," but he refused, perhaps because Schindler's story involved a man who deliberately set out to frustrate the Holocaust, while from personal experience Polanski knew that fate and chance played an inexplicable role in most survivals. His own survival (and that of his father) are in a sense as random as Szpilman's, which is perhaps why he was attracted to this story. He wandered Krakow and Warsaw, a frightened child, cared for by the kindness of strangers. Polanski himself is a Holocaust survivor, saved at one point when his father pushed him through the barbed wire of a camp. More than once we hear him reassuring others that everything will turn out all right this faith is based not on information or even optimism, but essentially on his belief that, for anyone who plays the piano as well as he does, it must. We sense that his Szpilman is a man who came early and seriously to music, knows he is good, and has a certain aloofness to life around him. Szpilman is played in the film by Adrien Brody, who is more gaunt and resourceless than in Ken Loach's " Bread And Roses" (2000), where he played a cocky Los Angeles union organizer. Then the movie tells the long and incredible story of how Szpilman survived the war by hiding in Warsaw, with help from the Polish resistance. A Jewish police force is formed to enforce Nazi regulations, and Szpilman is offered a place on it he refuses, but a good friend, who joins, later saves his life by taking him off a train bound for the death camps. The city's Jews are forced to give up their possessions and move to the Warsaw ghetto, and there is a somber shot of a brick wall being built to enclose it. His family takes heart from reports that England and France have declared war surely the Nazis will soon be defeated and life will return to normal. Szpilman's family was prosperous and seemingly secure, and his immediate reaction was, "I'm not going anywhere." We watch as the Nazi noose tightens. The film is based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, who was playing Chopin on a Warsaw radio station when the first German bombs fell.
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