“Just take it,” Władysław Szpilman says, his long face averted, as his family argue fruitlessly with a buyer about the price of his grand piano. “Just take it.” ‘It’, in this case, is a Bechstein, the Jewish family’s most prized possession – the instrument Szpilman has composed on for years. But money is getting tight, and what can they do? Eat the piano? The buyer smiles, victorious: a vulture picking the carcass. Szpilman merely waves his hand. It’s the beginning of the end.
More than any of the gruesome sequences of death and humiliation – of which there are plenty in a movie about the Holocaust – this scene from Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) has always stuck with me. In a nutshell, it lays bare what makes the film so fascinating: its understated approach to trauma too great to be contained in words. When shocking things happen, the camera just watches. When tears are spilt, the lens doesn’t feed off of them. And when loss after loss is heaped upon the protagonist, we rarely glimpse more than Szpilman’s stoic endurance, his quietly taking in stride whatever obstacles life throws his way. But precisely in that, Polanski’s direction exposes the depths of his desperation.
That this strategy works largely comes down to the film’s lead performance. Adrien Brody, with his worn, hollow face and wistful gaze, shows us the Holocaust through the eyes of an accomplished musician: a quiet, sensitive man who believes that, somehow, his talents and a not inconsiderable portion of good luck are going to carry him through. He’s not an idealist; he’s not a hero; at times, he seems so passive he may well be called apathetic. At first, I found it infuriating. But when I watched the film a second time, I thought it rang all the more true. For in The Pianist, Polanski – a survivor of a Polish ghetto himself – doesn’t tell the story of a hero. He tells the story of a witness: the story of a man caught within a system that numbs and leaves little room for ethical choices. And when we see Szpilman’s fingers hesitate over the keys in one of the film’s final scenes, we understand that, often enough, survival is not an act of triumph but one of resignation to the course of fate.
by Nadine Schmidt