The Pianist

The Pianist is a 2002 biographical war drama film directed by Roman Polanski who as a boy growing up in Poland watched while the Nazis devastated his country during World War II. The film is based on the true story of a Polish-Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman (5 December 1911 – 6 July 2000) who spent five years struggling against the Nazi occupation of Warsaw.

In the 1930s, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) who born to a wealthy Jewish family was known as the most accomplished piano player in Poland. The Szpilmans have a large and comfortable flat in Warsaw which Wladyslaw shares with his family. While Wladyslaw and his family are aware of the looming presence of German forces and Hitler's designs on Poland, they are convinced that the Nazis are a menace which will pass and that England and France will step forward to aid Poland in the event of a real crisis.

In September 1939, a German bomb rips through a radio station while Wladyslaw plays live on the air and shattered his naivete. As the German grip tightens upon Poland, Wladyslaw and his family are selected for deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. Refusing to face a certain death, Wladyslaw at last deciding to escape and goes into hiding in a comfortable apartment provided by a friend. However, when his benefactor goes missing, Wladyslaw is left to fend for himself and he spends the next several years dashing from one abandoned home to another, desperate to avoid capture by German occupation troops.

WLADYSLAW SZPILMAN

In August 1944, Polish resistance mounts the Warsaw Uprising, attacking a German building across the street from Wladyslaw's hideout. A tank shells his apartment and he is forced to flee and hide elsewhere as fighting rages around. Over the course of the next months the city is destroyed and emptied of the population and Wladyslaw, entirely alone, searches desperately for shelter and supplies among the ruins. Until one night, he is discovered by the Nazi officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), who learns that Wladyslaw is a pianist and asks him to play on the grand piano nearby. The decrepit Wladyslaw plays "Ballade in G Minor", which moves Hosenfeld, who then helps him survive, allowing him to hide in the attic of an empty house and regularly brings him food.

WILM HOSENFELD

When Russian army draws closer to Warsaw in January 1945, Hosenfeld gives Wladyslaw a final parcel of food and his overcoat to survive for a few more days when the Russian army will liberate him soon. He asks Wladyslaw of his surname, which sounds exactly like "spielmann", the German word for pianist and Hosenfeld promises to listen for him on the radio. Shortly afterward, Wladyslaw sees Polish partisans and overcome with joy, goes outside to meet his countrymen. Seeing his coat given to him by Hosenfeld, they think he is a German and try to kill him, before he can convince them he is Polish.

Newly freed Poles walk past an improvised Russian prisoner of war camp and Hosenfeld is among the prisoners. The Poles hurl insults at the Germans through the fence but when Hosenfeld hears that one of the Poles is a musician, he goes to the fence and tells him that he has helped Wladyslaw and asks him to ask Wladyslaw to return the favor, before a Russian soldier throws him back down on the ground. The Polish musician visits Wladyslaw and takes him to the site but they have vanished. Wladyslaw is unable to help Hosenfeld, but he returns to play piano for the radio station.

At the ending of the film, it tells Hosenfeld died in a Soviet Prisoner-of-War Camp in 1952 and Wladyslaw lived to be an old man, dying in Warsaw at the age of eighty-eight.

Movie Trailer:

      

Chopin Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op 23