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Karin Badt is associate professor of cinema and theater at the University of Paris, VIII.
Roman Polanski's forte is evil; he has treated this theme for the last fifty years. His latest film, The Pianist (winner of the Palme D'Or and three Academy Awards) gives the context to his vision: the Holocaust. Using the memoir of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish pianist who survived the Warsaw ghetto, Polanski tells his own story. His parents deported, his mother murdered, Polanski emerged from the war a twelve-year-old boy on his own, determined to make it in cinema. Like Szpilman, he became a world-renowned artist.
Szpilman's and Polanski's stories coincide, it seems, to give the same message of the triumph of art. The film begins with Szpilman playing Chopin in 1939 and ends in 1945 with him finishing his piece--a victory of survival. We are elevated by the chords of Chopin, the celebration of the human spirit, the power of Polanski's film. And yet Polanski's own art, this film, does not really offer this redemption. Instead, it offers us a cruel mirror to ourselves, our own curious relationship to art, our own complicity in evil.
Polanski forces us to watch, just as he did, the painful, progressive, build-up of evil. We are slotted into the same position of passivity and impotence. He tells his story in a cold way, choosing as his lead Adrien Brody, a none-too charismatic non-hero. With the...