The Pianist (2002) - Movie Review Example

In order to determine the film’s value, analysis will be focused on three of the film’s pivotal elements: directing, acting and music. It is through these elements wherein one will find that the film is a work of Polanski above all. It reflected his style, his genius, faults and failures and everything in between in his attempt to recreate the life and the sensibility of a martyred musician. The movie itself, its treatment of the story and the actor’s portrayal, presented the director’s interpretation of Wladyslaw’s experience in surviving the holocaust.

Everytime he faced death, Szpilman survived because he was assimilated to the Polish society, he had friends, he had help, and he had his talents. The Jewish Police pushed him off the vehicle because he was a genius. Then the Nazi soldier towards the end of the film helped him live because he was talented. The case would have been otherwise, had the Pianist been an ordinary Jewish who is not assimilated in the Polish society. For instance, the set design for the film was entrusted to Allan Starski and Anna Sheppard, set design and costume designer, respectively.

Both of them worked for Steven Spielberg’s opus, Schindler’s List, of the same theme: the Jewish experience under the Nazi atrocities. These two designers was able to reconstruct an era in their design that enabled the desired effect – the progression of horror in such peaceful city. The sequencing of streets, the film color tones, costumes, they highlighted the threats, the establishment of the ghetto, the indiscriminate killing, mass deportation and systematic extermination of Jews. With the help of these designers, Polanski was able to superbly recreate not only the period but the accuracy of the systematic deterioration of the Jewish plight in Poland during the Nazi occupation: from the building of the