HISTORY HAS all of a sudden become more than a school subject. After the opening of Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York - which brings the buried history of New York to life through drama - The Pianist is another epic that brings us back to the past.
Directed by renowned Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski, The Pianist is based on a memoir by Polish-born Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, in which he described his escape from German slaughters during World War II.
Szpilman (Adrien Brody, below) is a pianist at a radio station in Warsaw. During the German occupation, he is forced to sell his piano, and is thrown into a concentration camp with his family. He somehow survives what was to be known as the Holocaust by hiding until the war is over.
Rather than making a sensational and bloody Hollywood- type vehicle, Polanski's pragmatic style and outstanding cinematography - through which he won the Palme d'Or in Cannes last year - picture convincingly the horrors of war.
Some critics suggest that The Pianist is also a memoir of Polanski's, who himself witnessed World War II as a child. Szpilman, instead of being heroic, is more an observer. Through his eyes - or Polanski's - we see a gorgeous city tormented by guns and bombs, and the suffering of Jews. Brody succeeds in delivering the pain Szpilman, and the Jews, bore. The film's only flaw is the use of heavily accented English; it is irritating how the film tries to convince me the Jews in Poland talked to each other in their non-native tongue.
Those who are used to Hollywood mainstream flicks might find this film boring, as it is not formulated drama. But this film inspires deep thoughts about war in our time.