The footage of the film is sober and considerate. It gently strokes the melancholy face of the pianist, nervously watching the corpses all over the street, and calmly watching life shatter in an instant. Life is so sweet and so fragile. There are many unforgettable scenes entwined in the film, and there are scenes of real existential life and death dramas.
Polanski is very restrained throughout the film, almost using line-drawing techniques to reproduce the true Jewish history of World War II in his extremely implicit expression of right and wrong. The only emotional catharsis is the piano music on the ruins, using the power of music to push the movie to a climax.
In the film, although Spearman escaped again and again with the help of various friends and strangers, the human nature of that group is not all simple and great. What "The Pianist" shows is that in the "turbulent times" where only horror, loneliness and instinct remain, how the environment shapes people and allows them to grow or be distorted. The impact of war on the human mind is beyond our imagination. What's more valuable is that the film scene is extremely calm and objective, avoiding all accusations and sentimentality.
Roman Polanski uses a cruel way to create rhythm. He first brought something tragic, followed by showing a bit of humanity in the harsh environment, and then something more tragic. Even until the end of the film, Polanski refused to warm up. In Polanski's view, our world is a place where humanity is extinct. The so-called humanity is only God knows when there is a flash of light, and it cannot be taken seriously.
The great thing about "The Pianist" is that it puts all this far into the depth of the setting, leaving only a humble life to walk alone on the front stage. Especially when this life is still given the status of "pianist", the whole movie is more meaningful. At the beginning of the film, Valladyslau’s fingers danced on the black-and-white piano keys. From this moment on, the audience has learned that the pianist, who is described as getting thinner and thinner, is about to suffer in the film. As the plot unfolds, all events happen as expected by the audience. Valladyslau's family was torn apart during the war, and scrolls of suffering unfolded around him. Fortunately, there are always nobles to help him at critical moments, and he escaped from the dangers several times. When the entire Warsaw was destroyed, he became the only person standing on the ruins. However, the director Polanski was too eager to convey his feelings to the audience, thus ignoring the necessary foreshadowing and atmosphere. In this film, the audience has not yet entered the state, and the disasters on the screen have been presented scene by scene. This will make the listener not know who is in the disaster, so the sympathy for them can only be limited to the general sense of humanity at most. In general, Polanski wanted to convey his shock to the audience, but he was too impatient.
There are many characters in "The Pianist", and they have shown various behaviors in the war, deeply showing the complex expression of human nature in the war. The war destroyed the world, but the complexity and changes of human nature are highlighted in this desperate situation.
