 Movie
Reviews
with Evelyn Gough
The Pianist
Directed by Roman Polanski
 Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpielman in The Pianist.
Its been a long time since a movie haunted my dreams and a ected me as deeply as this award- winning masterpiece by acclaimed director Roman Polanski.
The Pianist is based on composer/pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's 1946 memoir, Death of a City and is one man's incredible story of survival in a world gone horrifyingly mad.
The film opens with Wladyslaw (Adrien Brody)playing piano on Polish State radio in what will turn out to be his last performance as a free man for many years.
It's Warsaw, September 1939, Wladyslaw is a Jew and the Nazis have just invaded the city.
Nothing will ever be the same again.He and his family, along with half a million other Jews, were herded into a walled ghetto where they were persecuted, starved and treated abhorrently.
Then came Hilter's Final Solution.Out of the half a million, only 60, 000 Jews would remain in the ghetto.The rest were transported in cargo trains to death camps.Wladyslaw escaped this fate, pulled from the crowd at the last moment by a former friend, Itzak Heller (Ray Smiles), a Nazi collaborator working as an auxiliary policeman.
Alone, his family gone forever, Wladyslaw struggled to stay alive in an extremely hostile and dangerous world ¡K Any movie about the holocaust is going to tear at your heart and The Pianist is no exception.
But there is a deeper resonance for the director.As a child, Polanski spent time in these very same ghettos during the German occupation and lost members of his family.
Now he, screenwriter Ronald Harwood, cinematographer Pawel Edelman and production designer Allan Starski (Oscar winner for Schindlers List )have faithfully recreated the degradation, humiliation, desperation, brutality and cruelty experienced by those imprisoned behind the ghetto walls.
(There few gasps of horror coming from the audience made it even more palpable.) But at the same time this is classic Polanski: he has personalised the vast canvas of the war years by focusing on the plight of one individual and has done a magni cent job, helped in no small part by an Oscar winning performance from Adrien Brody.
I couldn't recommend this movie more highly.
This is a must-see film.
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