Humanity manages to survive in apocalyptic horror

Rating: 10/10 (4 March 2008)

Polanski had to make a film about the tragic past of the country whose name he carries. He had to concentrate on the primal historical "crime" committed by cosmic time and the war in 1939-1945, the extermination of the Jews by the Germans with the vast complicity of the Poles. The film is brilliant in its dense darkness because Polanski does not concentrate his tale so much on the community but on one particular Jew and his family he will be the only survivor of (it is a true story). He does not choose a Jew that would represent money or work, but a pianist, an artist representing cultural, universal and human talent that has no ethnic color whatsoever. And yet he moves further. After showing the ghettoization of the Jews in Warsaw, then their enslavement and extermination, then the escape of this pianist and his clandestine survival in the hands of non-Jews, some honest resistant fighters who put themselves in danger because of their political action, some (at least one) making a personal profit out of their help, the pianist also sees the meaningful and significant upheaval of the Jews when the ghetto is nearly empty. Pathetic but too late. He sees the doomed upheaval of the liberal resistant fighters and this time too early so that the Germans can exterminate them. Note here the film never really concentrate on the SS as the evil doers and the others as submissive followers. All Germans are concerned. The sacrifice of these resistant fighters leads to nothing since it clears the way for the communists to be the only ones to profit from the arrival of the Russians. Polanski even pushes one step further and there the film becomes a gospel about the shiny side of humanity. That pianist will survive the last few weeks thanks to a Wehrmacht officer who will accept to hide his presence and to feed him through to the end , and even give him a coat  that could have been tragic when the Russians arrived  before leaving. The officer had been convinced to provide this help by some music played on a piano by the Jew in the middle of ruins and on the eve to the final defeat. Music as the universal humanistic language beyond barbarity. Beautiful. Inspiring. A real salvation and epiphany for us all. That is exactly where pathos is discarded and love comes into the picture. A love that can transcend hatred and reach cosmic time in the smallness of human historical if not purely existential time. And If the pianist survive up to 2000, the German officer died in captivity in the USSR in 1952. Irony of irony, it is nothing but irony.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines