Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center May/Jun 2003 "If they cut off my head, what do I say? Me and my head, or me and my body?" muses the hero of Roman Polanski's The Tenant, at the point where his intrusive neighbors have so whittled away his peace of mind and integrity of body that he might be about to disappear up just such a conundrum.
A lot of whittling goes on as well in The Pianist, on a much grander scale. The city of Warsaw, occupied by the Nazis in 1939, is broken down into an Aryan section and a Jewish quarter, which in turn is divided into a large and small ghetto. The latter is then dissolved and, in mid-1942, elimination of all the inhabitants of the ghetto begins with "resettlement" in the east, meaning to the death camp of Treblinka.
The family of concert pianist and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) undergoes simultaneous shrinkage: from their own home to two rooms in the ghetto, then a resettlement barracks, before they arc crammed onto a train for the camp. Except for Wladyslaw: tie becomes a unit of one, bundled from hiding hole to hiding hole as the city of Warsaw is whittled down around him.
This is, of course, a story of physical survival-measured out to the last bean and drop of water-not the existential crisis of the tenant. But one is readily translatable into the other, precisely because an obsessive focus on detail is the common currency of both. It's the Polanski technique, with its roots in the surrealist aesthetic: physical detail is both irreducibly real and familiar and, in another context, undeniably strange and threatening. And as the locus closes in on fewer and fewer details, it also approaches some final line: between life and death, or sanity and madness. There's even an unstated conundrum behind The Pianist that could be a complement to, or a restatement of, The Tenant: the dilemma of where you situate the "I."
When one goes into hiding, is driven into ever tighter corners, what's more important-what's preserved inside or what's kept out? Out of sight, out of mind, goes the saying, but The Pianist refutes it: what's out of sight here completely occupies and defines mental space. Don't give any sign of your existence or the neighbors will complain to a landlord with murderous sanctions. As Wladyslaw shrinks himself to fit these spaces, and as his means of sustenance often dwindle to nothing, the Him does seem to close around the question of what keeps him going and what is being preserved.
The answer to both might be his love of music-Polanski has suggested as much. In one hideaway, Wladyslaw's fingers dance in silent play over a real keyboard. As the bombs begin to fall in September 1939, Wladyslaw is giving a Chopin recital on Warsaw radio, and behind the film's closing credits he returns to his performance in a concert hall, as if in this continuity lay reality interrupted by six years of nightmare.
This would make The Pianist the story of spiritual triumph over physical adversity, which is a fair case for it, for its Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, and for the accolades it has received since, mainly because they implicitly acknowledge other kinds of "overcoming." Principal among these is Polanski's own, his comparable experiences as a child in the Krakow ghetto. This makes the film a good case for a kind of double healing, Polanski coming to terms with his past and resolving something in his art.
His own views on this ("I always knew that one day I would make a film about this painful chapter in Polish history") concur with those critics who have seen in this return home a return to form. It's as if the horrors of his cinema between the Krakow ghetto and now were distilled, purged by being returned to source and treated with a cohesive, unsensational rigor. Polanski has found the necessary objectivity by basing his film on Szpilman's own spare, unsensational account. In the words of Tom Charity's Time Out (London) review: "If the horrors he experienced ... fuelled the clammy expressionism of Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, and The Tenant, reliving them through this dramatic recreation seems to have purged the impulse to stylization. What Polanski does here is pay witness...."
This is a reasonable case, too, for The Pianist as a quasi-autobiographical document, an honest historical re-creation. But what if in a more fundamental way none of this is true? What if the schism opened up by the revelation of such brutality, vulnerability, absurdity, such sharply focused proximity to the line between life and death (one potato's distance) cannot be come to terms with, cannot be healed? It's the kind of schism-more a rapid multiplication of cracks in the texture of existence-that fuels the surrealist imagination, the situations and imagery that turn up in the short films (Two Men and a Wardrobe, The Fat and the Lean) Polanski made after the war.
His problem, in a way, has been how to accommodate this within much of his later feature filmmaking, alongside other impulses-to more straightforward, integrated drama and diverse genres (Tess, Pirates, and Frantic, for example). Which is to put to one side the question of whether everything he does should be tied to childhood experiences anyway. So what "form" could The Pianist represent a return to, except this thoroughly divided, unresolved one? All the more so as, first and foremost, this represents a return to ihe source of schism, to that "painful chapter" in Polanski's and Poland's history.
And as it proves, The Pianist is one of the most divided af all Polanski's films. Its own schism occurs at the point where it stops pretending to be an integrated family drama, the story of how the Szpilmans-father (Frank Finlay), mother (Maureen Lipman), Wladyslaw, and his two sisters and brother-cope with the dawning terror of just how ruthlessly the Nazis will proceed with their whittling, and becomes the story of one man alone in this blighted world.
In an interview from the Sixties, Polanski talked about how "my ideal would be to make a film with just one person," and how the concentration, the surrealist edge of his short films was difficult to maintain in a feature. "What I would like to do ... is a feature which would equal Two Men and a Wardrobe" but "as soon as people start talking in a short, it becomes like the beginning of a feature." As soon as people stop talking in the rather awkward, Europudding first part of The Pianist, it becomes Polanski's ideal: a two-and-a-half-hour short film.
The transition is the most brutal caesura. As the family is being loaded onto the train for Treblinka, a Jewish policeman, Itzak Heller (Roy Smiles), who has previously tried to recruit Wladyslaw and his brother and been bluntly rejected, simply pulls Wladyslaw out of the line and tells him to get lost. He is saved, and the door of the cattle truck is closed on his family. They are never seen again, but more than that they are never mentioned (there is no such absolute forgetting in Szpilman's account). Now released into his own limbo, with neither the living nor the dead, Wladyslaw is shuffled between hiding places, arbitrarily helped or betrayed by anonymous Poles, merely glimpsing through cracks and corners the uprising in the Jewish ghetto and then the devastating battle for Warsaw itself.
The hiding place is Polanski's favorite location, the source of salvation that is also the locus of dread (the wardrobe in Two Men and a Wardrobe is the hiding place that is not used, leaving the two men exposed to so much). The Pianist is not only Polanski's ur-short, it's a kind of historical background to all those permeable apartments, from Repulsion through Rosemary's Baby ("Fur Elise" tinkles from next door here, the "Moonlight Sonata" there) and The Tenant. The narrowing down involved, and the closing in on the very physical details of survival, also render the notion that The Pianist is about a spiritual triumph through love of music a little abstract, attenuated.
What is a profound surprise here is the way a figure from Polanski's fantasy is revealed in living, breathing, historical reality. In Cul-de-Sac, the hapless gangsters wait in vain for rescue from a spectral voice at the end of the phone called Katelbach, clear descendant of Beckett's Godot. In The Pianist, Katelbach actually comes, not just once but twice, a savior who is also an enemy. He's Itzak Heller, who plucks Wladyslaw from the death camp but condemns him to not-life. And he's Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), the German who finds Wladyslaw starving in his last blasted hideaway and preserves him until the German withdrawal from Warsaw.
At the time of Rosemary's Baby, in the English magazine Cinema, Tom Nairn called Cul-de-Sac Polanski's masterpiece, because its surrealistic humor gives it a satiric bite lacking when Polanski detours into horror per se and a "sentimental irrationalism." In retrospect, one might apply that label more to Cul-de-Sac-its Katelbach is such a neat intellectual abstraction, with the critic-pleasing connection to Beckett-whereas the diabolism of The Fearless Vampire Killers, Rosemary's Baby, and The Ninth Gate might well be a metaphor for the genocidal conspiracy Heller and Hosenfeld also represent. Katelbach here is enigmatic, terrible, and heavensent. To rephrase the epitaph of Welles's The Immortal Story, when Katelbach doesn't come, it's hard, and when he does come, surely it is very hard.
| [Author Affiliation] |
| Richard Combs wrote about John Frankenheimer in our Nov/Dec issue. |
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