Spilzman? What a beautiful name for a pianist...

Rating: 10/10 (29 December 2005)

In March 2003, Roman Polanski's "the Pianist" (2002) pocketed three Oscars including best actor (Adrien Brody) and best director (Roman Polanski). One month earlier, the ceremony of the French Oscars showered the movie with praise by attributing to it and his author similar prizes. Earlier in May 2002, the festival of Cannes crowned it of the most prestigious prize: the deservedly Golden Palm. Already in 2002 and chiefly throughout 2003, awards rained on Polanski's deeply moving piece of work and rightly so. It is a true return to form for him after an uneven career which started after the spooky "the Tenant" (1976) and wildly oscillated between duds (Pirates, 1986, Frantic, 1988) and palatable but not peerless works (Death and the Maiden, 1994, the Ninth Gate, 1999). "The Pianist" helped to rekindle the flame that made such treasures, hallmarks in their own domains (the wonderful "Rosemary's Baby", 1968 in the fantastic or the fabulous "Chinatown", 1974 in the film noir) and could be a stalwart success in the movie with the Second World War as the backdrop. It is perhaps Polanski's most personal film to date and the one he has always wanted to shot, surely to exorcise traumatic memories haunting him since his childhood. Like his main protagonist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, he experienced the horror of the ghetto of Warsaw.
To get his demons out of his head, he preferred to adapt for the screen Spilzman's memories, a genius pianist and a man who bit by bit lost his family and friends on whom he could rely, a man who was deprived of his piano and thus of his "raison d'être". As Stefan Zweig says: "to read is to live", well for him "to play is to live". Even when he has the opportunity to play, he has to refrain himself. See the scene in which he has settled down to his flat. Before leaving him, the owner says to him: "please, don't make noise". Polanski makes us share his craving for playing by putting his main protagonist in front of the sacred instrument ans plays us the music in Spilzman's head without the latter touches the keys. He was also a man who saw sorrow, pain and the unthinkable (the sequences in which German officers and soldiers kill Jewish people give goose pimples because they're precisely unthinkable). Throughout his sufferings, chance didn't totally relinquish him: he was rescued at the last minute by a Polish policeman (and a fellow of his brother) who stopped him from going up in the train of death to Auschwitz. At this moment, he was saved from death but he lost his family. Then, he had to rely on his courage to survive and enjoyed the help of some fellows even if they absconded (the woman Spilzman made the acquaintance at the beginning of the film and her husband who found him a flat). At last, the German officer at the end of the film, was his ultimate glimmer of hope.
Roman Polanski shot his film with a classic but startling directing for the sake of detail and realism. It has a linear but inevitable progression which has the look of a downward spiral: the tightening of the restrictions on Jewish people which become increasingly harsher (the armband to distinguish the Jewish from other peoples, then the delimitation and the encircling of the ghetto, the Jews chased away from their neighborhood and deported to the extermination camps) and the least sign of certainty is nearly automatically blighted: "we have work certificates at last" sighs Spilzman's father. Alas! Hopes blighted since just as he pronounces these words, a German officer asks them with other people to go outside. Some of them are killed while the others (including Spilzman's family) have to wait on a large square with thousands of others. Polanski also relates notable events with a minimum of means (the fight and shooting sequences are often perceived from a balcony or a window).
The second part of the film strongly recalls Polanski's murkiest hours extracted from his masterworks. For example, in his flat, Spilzman tries to be as quiet as possible and while searching for food in his kitchen and drops crockery. The noise makes his neighbor intervene and by giving the alarm in the building obliges him to flee once again. At this moment, we find one of Polanski's trademarks: the eerie neighbor who has a harmful influence on the hero and contributes to his or her fall (the Castevet in "Rosemary's Baby", the offbeat inhabitants of the building in "the Tenant". In another extent, when Spilzman has to lurk in the destroyed ghetto (the distant shot where we can see him trudging in the ruins of this apocalyptic landscape deserves to rank among Polanski's most notable shots in all his filmography), Polanski really places us amid a "in camera" in spite of the sprawling scenery.
The filmmaker should also be thanked for having chosen Adrien Brody in the main role. He works wonders in a part which seemed to be tailor-made for him, a far cry from his cardboard character in M Night Shyamalan's "the Village" (2004). He can act several persona in himself: a smart young man as well as a dirty and bearded tramp. His angular face, his acute and melancholic countenance stay with us for a long time. As for the German officers, they are often caricatured but ultimately Polanski eschews the trap of Manicheism which seemed to pervade the whole film thanks to the last sequences with the sympathetic German officer. Not all Nazis were beasts...
Interspersed with either unbearable, either excruciating or either moving sequences and with striking shots, "the Pianist" has its place on the podium of Polanski's towering achievements. See it any costs! Unfortunately it would seem that the flame began to flicker again given the lukewarm critics "Oliver Twist" met this year. The slump again? Only time will tell...