The Pianist (2002) is a film directed by Roman Polanski based on an autobiographical novel by the Polish-Jewish composer and pianist Władysław Szpilman who survived the Holocaust by hiding in Warsow for the duration of the war.
Synopsis
The film starts with the bombing of Warsaw where Szpilman is recording at the time. He and his Jewish family and friends are forced to move into the Warsaw Ghetto in the beginning of the German occupation. The ghetto starts getting crowded as the Germans deport a growing number of Polish Jews into it. The family witnesses a multitude of acts of brutality against Jewish people. The family is cut off from their Polish people in their lives. At one point, Szpilman and his family is sent to Treblinka for extermination under the pretense that they will be sent to a labor cap. He is saved by an acquaintance of his who has joined the Jewish police who yanks him out of the line of people being led towards the train to Treblinka.
Szpilman is put up in an empty apartment by friends of his who have joined the resistance. After hiding for quite some time witnesses the 1943 ghetto uprising from his window. He is told to flee by his friend of his who gets arrested. Szpilman is forced to leave after accidentally revealing his being inside the apartment. A neighbor who hears him is an anti-semite. He has no one to bring him food anyway so he has to go and hide on the streets.
His next hideout is an apartment his other Polish friends find for him. A sound technician who does not remember him has joined the resistance is tasked with taking care of him. The fraudulently collects money for Szpilman and almost lets him starve. Szpilman is forced to flee again in the spring of 1945 when there is another ghetto uprising. He ends up in an attic where he is discovered by a Wehrmacht officer, captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who is a music lover and who helps Szpilman survive the last weeks of German occupation by supplying him with food.
Szpilman continues his career after the war. The epilogue states that Szpilman dies in 2000 and that Wilm Hosenfeld dies in a Soviet prison camp in 1952.
Commentary
The Pianist was widely acclaimed by critics. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002 and won three Academy Awards (Oscars) for direction, best actor and best screenplay. The Pianist has several long takes showing Szpilman's on the move, trying to avoid capture during the Polish resistance uprising between late 1944 and January 1945. The set shows the utter destruction Warsaw suffered in the late stages of the war. The city of Warsaw was purposefully destroyed by the Germans as a reprisal for the uprisings of where there had been several. I think the film manages to convey some of what must have felt like to hide in the squalor of occupied Warsaw for years. Polanski puts Szpilman in the position of an observer of larger events with his long takes of what happens when Szpilman watches what's going on from his hideouts.
The Pianist is based on an interesting true story of not only Szpilman but of the Holocaust in Warsaw in general.