Upon researching this film I found out that director Roman Polanski is himself a Holocaust survivor; his father pushed him through a barbed wire fence to save him. It’s clear then that this film is a very personal one to Polanski. The horrors of that part of Polanski’s life must be burned into his mind, as he pulls no punches when showing the cruel, heartless treatment given to the Jews by the Nazi’s.

Indeed, The Pianist is a very powerful film, Polanski reminds us constantly throughout the film of the pain and suffering dished out to the Jewish people by the Germans. Random shootings, beatings, degradation, these were the kinds of things that a Jew had to avoid every day of his/her life during the occupation if he/she wished to survive.

In-fact surviving the holocaust was more down to luck and coincidence than anything else. And that’s the overriding feeling I took away from this film. Szpilman didn’t live till 2000 because he was heroic, he lived that long thanks mainly to good luck and being in the right place at the right time. Adrien Brody perfectly conveys Szpilman, a man we meet at the beginning to be almost arrogant, an intellectual man with a good family.

As the film moves on Szpilman is being carried forward by events well out with his control, he becomes an emotionless creature, stumbling around scrounging for food and water, doing anything to survive. The contrast between the Szpilman we first meet and the one near the end of the film presents an astonishing piece of acting from Brody. Gaunt, unshaven and with matted long hair, Brody manages to show every minute of the horrors that Szpilman has seen across his weathered face.

Since the film concerns itself mainly with the journey of Szpilman the support comes and goes throughout the film, having little time to make an impact. His family shares the majority of the first half of the film with Brody and they are all convincing, coming across as very close. It was a little strange to see Maureen Lipman as the mother, she is best known on these shores for her rather irritating Telecom commercials from a few years back. I liked the father of the family a great deal and the brother as well.

The only other character to make an impact is the German Captain, Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann). He meets up with Szpilman late on in the film and shows us that even though the Nazi’s committed atrocities beyond words, they weren’t all bad. Hosenfeld is a family man who takes pity on Szpilman after he plays piano for him. This presents us with a wonderful scene as a dishevelled Szpilman plays a mini-concert in the middle of a decimated Warsaw.

I have seen very little of Polanski’s body of work, so I am unsure if he is a predominantly visual director. Here he handles proceedings very well, the pace is deliberate, but the combination of Brody’s mesmerising performance and Polanski’s startling visuals means that I was never bored. The film is stacked full of stark images, from the brutal randomness of the persecution on the Jews, to the frankly astonishing sight of Szpilman wandering out into a completely destroyed Warsaw. Polanski also shoots the scenes when Szpilman is in hiding very cleverly.

Szpilman is hidden by the underground in various flats during the movie. Since no-one knows he is there he must remain indoors and keep very quiet. Szpilman watches the events of the war from his flat windows and rather than going to ground level and shooting any action that is happening outside, Polanski shoots it all from Szpilman’s point of view. This puts us right in Szpilman’s shoes and is a very nice touch.