Never again

Rating: 8/10 (20 July 2015)

Soundtrack for this review: El pianista del gueto de Varsovia by Jorge Drexler
It is hard to review this movie. It is not easy to evaluate this movie in terms of its acting, its quality, its directing, with an armchair attitude that ignores the crudeness and harshness of real life. It is hard to say phrases like "Roman Polanski, perhaps due to its own experience, captures perfectly the feeling of everyday life of Polish Jews during the Second World War, its sadness and despair but also the tiny moments of hope", however true that might be.
It is very hard to rate this just as a movie, and not as a reminder for the human race of what are we capable of. I'm often reluctant to watch Holocaust movies because I know beforehand that they will have very hard to digest moments, and they are almost an act of masochism, two hours of intense suffering. But they are necessary, they are real stories that urge to be told, and need to be heard so that they don't happen again.
In a world where islamophobic parties are winning votes in Europe, where Americans proudly wave a flag that is the symbol of slavery in front of their president, these movies are indispensable. We cannot allow ourselves to fall into the collective madness that Germany fell into between 1933 and 1945. We should have learnt by now that technology has allowed the State to mobilize way too many resources, and the extermination of an entire group of people is only a button away. Not to mention the fact that these things still happen in more remote corners of the world, where they don't destabilize global geopolitics.
So it would be too frivolous from my side to evaluate Polanski's direction or Brody's acting, as if this was fiction. The feeling I have after having watched The Pianist is not the one of a film critic that passively observes reality from behind his desk, but an active one, the imperative of making sure that nothing like this ever happens again.