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Preview by Jack Foley |
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ROMAN Polanski became the talk of the summer of 2002 when his latest film,
The Pianist, won the coveted Palme d’Or at the prestigious Cannes Film
Festival (an honour which has previously been presented to the likes of Pulp
Fiction).
Starring Adrien Brody (of Summer of Sam/The Thin Red Line fame), the movie
tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a World War Two era Polish pianist
who lived in the Warsaw ghettos, escaped from Nazi concentration camps and,
thanks to his skill and flair for music, survived to tell about it.
The film is based on Szpilman’s own autobiography, Pianist, which was
published in 1946 and marks something of a personal achievement for the 68-year-old
Polanski, who told journalists at Cannes that he had waited his whole life
to make it.
"The exciting thing about finding this material was that it was not my
personal story," he revealed at a news conference. "It was something
that I know about, something that I remember very well, something that helped
me to recreate the period and events without talking about myself or people
around me."
The director of films such as Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby was born
to Jewish parents in Paris and returned to Poland when he was two.
After escaping the ghetto himself, he spent the war wandering through occupied
Poland alone, while his parents were deported to a concentration camp, where
his mother died.
Though likened to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, for its depiction
of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the concentration camps, the film
apparently refrains from apportioning blame, something which Polanski describes
as a strength of the book.
Referring to the novel’s ‘very optimistic way of dealing with such
a horror’, he also claimed that another of its strengths is its ‘restraint’.
"It shows that there are good and bad Poles, and the same goes for the
Jews and the Germans. They're just simply human."
The film’s star, Brody, spoke equally as passionately about the project
and the lengths he went to prepare for such an important role. He claims to
have spent six months in isolation, lost a lot of weight and learnt to play
Chopin - something he describes as being even more difficult than not eating.
Needless to say, critics hailed the film as Polanski’s finest movie in
years, while heaping praise on Brody. In addition, it has been named best
film by the National Society of Critics in America (announced recently). Click
here for full story...
The film has also been nominated for Best Dramatic Film in this year’s
Golden Globes, with Brody also
receiving a nod for Best Actor. Expect it to feature prominently at the Oscars.
The movie opens in the UK on January 24.
US critical reaction…
As
UK critics prepare to deliver their verdict, the US media ensured that The
Pianist was equally well-received when it opened in the States over the first
weekend of the New Year.
LA Weekly led the accolades, by predicting that it ‘will break your heart
many times over’, while Film Journal International referred to it, simply,
as ‘an important film’.
Slant Magazine awarded it three out of four and stated that it ‘achieves
something that approaches near transcendence’.
There were some negative notices, however, with Hollywood Reporter opining
that ‘you can't help feel disappointed that one of the few directors
who actually lived through this tragic period isn't able to personalise the
material more’.
Film Threat, meanwhile, felt that ‘you’ve seen it all before’,
while Village Voice felt that it ‘suffers from over-explanation’.
But the reaction was generally positive. Entertainment Weekly awarded it a
near-perfect A-, stating that the movie is one ‘of riveting power and
sadness, a great match of film and filmmaker - and star, too’.
While the New York Times wrote that it is ‘one of the very few non-documentary
movies about Jewish life and death under the Nazis that can be called definitive’.
The Chicago Tribune, however, perhaps sums it up best, stating that ‘The
Pianist is the film Roman Polanski may have been born to make’.
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