RSSRoman Polanski’s new film The Pianist is a work of genius on every level, except, alas, for the press-pack promotional slogan attributed to the director himself. “The Pianist is a testimony to the power of music, the will to live, and the courage to stand against evil.” If he actually said it, he flew in the face of his own masterpiece, which is a testimony to none of those things. In the Warsaw ghetto, the power of music, the will to live and the courage to stand against evil added up to very little, and The Pianist has the wherewithal to respect that sad fact and make sense of it. In the Warsaw ghetto, what counted was luck, and the luck had to be very good. The odds were almost impossible to beat. For the Nazis, that was the whole idea. To sum up his story in a sound-bite, Polanski would have done better to borrow the two words everyone remembers from one of his previous triumphs: “It’s Chinatown.”
In Chinatown the bad guys did what they wanted, and so they do in The Pianist. The central story is about a survivor, the famous young musician Wladyslaw Szpilman. At a critical moment, his talent saves him. If this had been the only message, the film would not even have had the merits of Schindler’s List. Steven Spielberg did his best to stave off the uplift, but inevitably he was stuck with a denial of what Primo Levi said was the real story of the Holocaust, which was not about anybody’s survival, even his: the real story was about the drowned, not the saved. If Polanski had compounded the same fault by suggesting that a gift for playing Chopin could get you a free pass, he would have been in the same case as Spielberg only worse. But in fact he does an even better job than Spielberg of making sure that in watching the lifeboat we don’t forget the ocean of annihilation it is trying to cross. At the end of The Pianist you would need to be very dense to think that Szpilman, who lived to play the piano again, had managed to do so by any mechanism except blind chance.
Spielberg offset his story of the saved by two main devices: the symbolic device of the little girl in the red coat — the only splash of colour in a black and white film — and the purely realistic device, employed with unprecedented verisimilitude, of showing the scope of the crime through violent incident. In Spielberg’s camp, a Jewish woman tells the guards that they are mismanaging the construction of a new building. The Nazis agree with her suggestions but shoot her anyway, for having spoken. The incident stands out for its poisoned richness of implication. In Polanski’s ghetto, such incidents arrive one after the other. They are each as powerful, and what is more they join up seamlessly, in a continuity of horror that would keep your hands over your eyes if your hands could move from the armrests of your seat. In Schindler’s List we have to imagine how the little girl in the red coat goes to her doom; which leaves the possibility that we might not imagine it. In The Pianist, the little boy trying to wriggle back through a hole in the ghetto wall after a foraging expedition on the outside perishes right in front of your eyes. Szpilman is trying to pull the boy through the hole to safety. On the other side of the wall, the guards are kicking the boy to pulp from behind.
(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)