Customer Reviews
Fantastic - By: Evan Skuthorpe, 06 Sep 2008 
This film is fantastic. So engrossing & emotional. It is one of the great war films!
Surviving destruction and genocide - By: Gary Selikow, 10 Jun 2008 The Pianist is the true story of the struggle to survive the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto of Polish Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman.
It tells how he survived against the odds , hiding in various parts of the city , before his life was saved by a German officer , who despised the Nazis brutality & genocide , a true righteous gentile , Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.
Unlike many personal holocaust accounts , which are of concentration & death camps , this one is an account of life & death in the Warsaw ghetto.
The movie portrays life & death in the ghetto : the disease , the starvation & the Nazi mass murders of hundreds of thousands of men , women & children. The imagery of the ghetto is brough to life, with heartrending scenes of the Jews being herded into & out of the ghetto & of Nazi brutality. REcreated scenes, will stay with the viewer, like a young woman being shot in the head for asking the Nazi guard where the Nazis are taking them, a mother holding a smalll boy who is dying of thirst, & begging for water for her child.
A little girl, holding an empty bird cage, & crying because she cannot find her family.
Roman Polanski has showed his flare for directing once again, & brilliant acting by Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman, Emilia Fox as his gentile female friend Dorota, & Thomas Kretschmann as Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.
A story of one man's quest for survival, among the cruel genocide of millions.
A Smaller Summary - By: Mr. James William Flower, 18 May 2008 An incredible story of survival amidst one of the most appallling atrocities of modern times. A superb performance from Brody, with equallly memorable performances from his co stars. Shocking at times, genuinely subtle & moving at others. An incredible film, giving a moving tribute to a historical episode that the world should never forget. Five of the best pounds you will ever spend!
When there is one little bloom in the apocalyptic horror - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 04 Mar 2008 Polanski had to make a film about the tragic past of the country whose name he carries. He had to concentrate on the primal historical "crime" committed by cosmic time & the war in 1939-1945, the extermination of the Jews by the Germans with the vast complicity of the Poles. The film is brilliant in its dense darkness because Polanski does not concentrate his tale so much on the community but on one particular Jew & his family he will be the only survivor of (it is a true story). He does not choose a Jew that would represent money or work, but a pianist, an artist representing cultural, universal & human talent that has no ethnic color whatsoever. And yet he moves further. After showing the ghettoization of the Jews in Warsaw, then their enslavement & extermination, then the escape of this pianist & his clandestine survival in the hands of non-Jews, some honest resistant fighters who put themselves in danger because of their political action, some (at least one) making a personal profit out of their help, the pianist also sees the meaningful & significant upheaval of the Jews when the ghetto is nearly empty. Pathetic but too late. He sees the doomed upheaval of the liberal resistant fighters & this time too early so that the Germans can exterminate them. Note here the film never reallly concentrate on the SS as the evil doers & the others as submissive followers. All Germans are concerned. The sacrifice of these resistant fighters leads to nothing since it clears the way for the communists to be the only ones to profit from the arrival of the Russians. Polanski even pushes one step further & there the film becomes a gospel about the shiny side of humanity. That pianist will survive the last few weeks thanks to a Wehrmacht officer who will accept to hide his presence & to feed him through to the end , & even give him a coat - that could have been tragic when the Russians arrived - before leaving. The officer had been convinced to provide this help by some music played on a piano by the Jew in the middle of ruins & on the eve to the final defeat. Music as the universal humanistic language beyond barbarity. Beautiful. Inspiring. A real salvation & epiphany for us alll. That is exactly where pathos is discarded & love comes into the picture. A love that can transcend hatred & reach cosmic time in the smalllness of human historical if not purely existential time. And If the pianist survive up to 2000, the German officer died in captivity in the USSR in 1952. Irony of irony, it is nothing but irony.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
