I started watching the film knowing no more than it was about the holocaust it's a graphic film, that had me literally open mouthed, and a few of the scenes had me crying. As the film went on towards the end I started to feel the plot was a little far fetched and i got quite angry, thinking it was ruining a film wreaked with sadness about the most tragic event of the 20th century. However it wasn't til it finished, jsut before the final credits rolled that i realised that this story of Wladyslaw Spzilman was in fact true life. I was so shocked and absolutely amazed at this extraordinary tale. It really shuns your life into perspective. I don't know if this was the desired effect but the ending made me feel sad for the Nazi soldier.

This film is fantastic. So engrossing and emotional. It is one of the great war films!

The Pianist is the true story of the struggle to survive the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto of Polish Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman.

It tells how he survived against the odds , hiding in various parts of the city , before his life was saved by a German officer , who despised the Nazis brutality and genocide , a true righteous gentile , Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.
Unlike many personal holocaust accounts , which are of concentration and death camps , this one is an account of life and death in the Warsaw ghetto.

The movie portrays life and death in the ghetto : the disease , the starvation and the Nazi mass murders of hundreds of thousands of men , women and children. The imagery of the ghetto is brough to life, with heartrending scenes of the Jews being herded into and out of the ghetto and of Nazi brutality. REcreated scenes, will stay with the viewer, like a young woman being shot in the head for asking the Nazi guard where the Nazis are taking them, a mother holding a small boy who is dying of thirst, and begging for water for her child.
A little girl, holding an empty bird cage, and crying because she cannot find her family.
Roman Polanski has showed his flare for directing once again, and brilliant acting by Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman, Emilia Fox as his gentile female friend Dorota, and Thomas Kretschmann as Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.
A story of one man's quest for survival, among the cruel genocide of millions.

An incredible story of survival amidst one of the most appalling atrocities of modern times. A superb performance from Brody, with equally memorable performances from his co stars. Shocking at times, genuinely subtle and moving at others. An incredible film, giving a moving tribute to a historical episode that the world should never forget. Five of the best pounds you will ever spend!

Polanski had to make a film about the tragic past of the country whose name he carries. He had to concentrate on the primal historical "crime" committed by cosmic time and the war in 1939-1945, the extermination of the Jews by the Germans with the vast complicity of the Poles. The film is brilliant in its dense darkness because Polanski does not concentrate his tale so much on the community but on one particular Jew and his family he will be the only survivor of (it is a true story). He does not choose a Jew that would represent money or work, but a pianist, an artist representing cultural, universal and human talent that has no ethnic color whatsoever. And yet he moves further. After showing the ghettoization of the Jews in Warsaw, then their enslavement and extermination, then the escape of this pianist and his clandestine survival in the hands of non-Jews, some honest resistant fighters who put themselves in danger because of their political action, some (at least one) making a personal profit out of their help, the pianist also sees the meaningful and significant upheaval of the Jews when the ghetto is nearly empty. Pathetic but too late. He sees the doomed upheaval of the liberal resistant fighters and this time too early so that the Germans can exterminate them. Note here the film never really concentrate on the SS as the evil doers and the others as submissive followers. All Germans are concerned. The sacrifice of these resistant fighters leads to nothing since it clears the way for the communists to be the only ones to profit from the arrival of the Russians. Polanski even pushes one step further and there the film becomes a gospel about the shiny side of humanity. That pianist will survive the last few weeks thanks to a Wehrmacht officer who will accept to hide his presence and to feed him through to the end , and even give him a coat - that could have been tragic when the Russians arrived - before leaving. The officer had been convinced to provide this help by some music played on a piano by the Jew in the middle of ruins and on the eve to the final defeat. Music as the universal humanistic language beyond barbarity. Beautiful. Inspiring. A real salvation and epiphany for us all. That is exactly where pathos is discarded and love comes into the picture. A love that can transcend hatred and reach cosmic time in the smallness of human historical if not purely existential time. And If the pianist survive up to 2000, the German officer died in captivity in the USSR in 1952. Irony of irony, it is nothing but irony.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines