The Pianist

My class (DEC 4A) is required to be the host for The Pianist movie screening. My first thought of this movie is it’s going to be a very pale boring movie. My friend already tells me about the synopsis of the story, not all but only a little. When she said the movie about the Jews, what comes into my mind is the 'killing scene'. Oh, how I didn’t want to see this movie, you don’t know how irritated I am with World War II era war/Holocaust movies? By the way, this movie is screening almost two and a half hours long. But, we divided it into two parts in two days, part 1 and part 2 so that all semester 4 students can go back to their hostel early. I almost sneak out from the hall because the movie is too extreme to watch. I can see my friends are crying by looking at the Nazi’s armies tortured the Jews; it is not because of mercy perhaps because of the violence towards human?

This is the synopsis about The Pianist.

The Pianist starts out in Warsaw in 1939. Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a gifted pianist who specialized in played Chopin pieces, which he did over Polish radio. He played the last live music heard over Polish radio airwaves before Nazi artillery hit. He and his family, including his father (Frank Finlay), his mother (Maureen Lipman), his older brother Henryk (Ed Stoppard), and his two sisters Regina (Julia Raynor) and Halina (Jessica Kate Meyer), are all captured and sent to the Warsaw ghetto. The Nazis then decide to exterminate some of the Jews in the ghetto, s

o they begin deporting them to the concentration camps. As he and his family are being loaded up on the trains to be shipped away to the camps, a former friend named Itzak Heller (Roy Smiles), now a Nazi collaborator working as an auxiliary police officer, saves him by pulling him out of the line. He spends the next couple of years moving from hideout to hideout, helped by Jewish sympathizers, including a cellist he had met earlier named Dorota (Emilia Fox), and a singer named Janina (Ruth Platt) with her husband Bogucki (Ronan Vibert.) He might have had a romance with Dorota, but the war got in the way. After he can’t make it to any more safe houses, he spends the last part of the war in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. It is there he is confronted by a music-loving Nazi soldier named Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), who helps Szpilman ride out the rest of the war after an impromptu performance given by the pianist.

The story gave the main character some hope without getting sentimental. That makes me want to watch it more. Throughout his hiding, he witnesses some awful things being done to his fellow Jews. He is so lucky that he manage to survive. The main character of this movie, Brody ( Szpilman) plays the character perfectly. The Pianist is definitely not for everyone. I don’t think young kids should see it, because it is brutal with its violence (I think some students walked out of the screening after seeing some of it.) If you want to see an uncensored, unapologetic movie about the reality of the Holocaust and how one man’s survival of it, then by all means, check it out unapologetic movie about the reality of the Holocaust and how one man’s survival of it, then by all means, check it out. It’s not one of my favorite movies of the year, but it is far from boring.

K,Thanks for reading.

Salam.