Roman Polanski's Landscape of Aloneness

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY, NY Times

January 26, 2003 

Adrien Brody, left, and Roman Polanski on the set of "The Pianist," about a a loner who hid during the Holocaust and survived.

ROMAN POLANSKI is at an age — he'll turn 70 in August — when most filmmakers have little to look forward to except lifetime achievement awards. When I last saw Mr. Polanski, three years ago in Paris, those honors were already starting to roll in. He had recently received prizes for his body of work from the Académie Française and the European Film Awards. Just a couple of days earlier he had been installed, with great pomp and ceremony, as a member of France's Académie des Beaux Arts. And all this recognition was making him nervous. "Is it a message that I should quit or something?" he wondered. "Does it mean life's over? I'm not ready to quit, I can tell you this."

He certainly wasn't. His 15th feature, the sleekly amusing occult thriller, "The Ninth Gate," was then in release in Europe, and he had acquired, he told me, the rights to a Holocaust memoir called "The Pianist" by Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish musician who survived the war in hiding in his native Warsaw. Mr. Polanski had himself escaped a Polish ghetto (Krakow, in his case) and survived the Nazi occupation of his country — he was 12 when the war ended — and he had been thinking for a long time about making a film set in that grim period. He had turned down Steven Spielberg's offer to direct "Schindler's List," because that story took place in Krakow and seemed too close to his own experience. But when he read Szpilman's memoir, which impressed him as "very dry, without sentimentalism or embellishments," he thought, "It's either now or never." His tone of voice made it abundantly clear that "never" was not a serious option.

In retrospect, it seems providential that Mr. Polanski passed up the chance to direct "Schindler's List." That picture — sweeping, epic and grandly moving — is the Holocaust movie Steven Spielberg was born to make. The more intimate, introspective and ruefully ironic saga of Wladyslaw Szpilman's survival is a story that no one but Roman Polanski could have told so well. "The Pianist" is at its heart the tale of a man alone, and Mr. Polanski has been for the past four decades the cinema's pre-eminent connoisseur of solitude.

Ever since his first feature, the elegantly unsettling "Knife in the Water" (1963), Mr. Polanski has devoted his creative life to exploring the varied geography of loneliness, most obviously in intense chamber dramas like "Repulsion" (1965), "Cul de Sac" (1966), "The Tenant" (1976) and "Death and the Maiden" (1994), but also in his fierce "Macbeth" (1971), whose guilt-racked hero becomes more and more isolated as the story marches inexorably to its tragic conclusion, and in his Thomas Hardy adaptation, "Tess" (1980), whose heroine is brutally cast out of society.

Even his biggest commercial success, "Rosemary's Baby" (1968), has as the core of its considerable horror the progressive, systematic isolation of its protagonist, a friendly, normal young woman who is, by the end, completely cut off from the world outside her gloomy Manhattan apartment building — hemmed in, and slowly suffocated, by the narrowing circle formed by her narcissistic husband and her, let's say, overbearing neighbors. O.K., they're Satanists, which gives the story a pulp-melodramatic aspect (and probably accounts to some extent for the movie's popularity), but as Mr. Polanski treats the material — coolly, matter-of-factly — "Rosemary's Baby" seems less a lurid shocker than a kind of boldly stylized existential fable: Hell really is other people, especially when they are people determined to impose themselves on weaker creatures. Poor Rosemary is like a sick lamb separated from her flock by a pack of ravening wolves.

In "The Tenant" — which is to my mind Mr. Polanski's most grievously underappreciated film — he himself plays the title role, a Polish exile in Paris who, like Rosemary, has a few problems with his neighbors. The older, established tenants in the building — solid bourgeois citizens, one and all — treat this unassuming little man, Trelkovsky, as if he were a mortal threat to their peace of mind, and so, gradually, insidiously, they destroy him. Everything they say, every suspicious look they direct at him, tells Trelkovsky that he is not one of them — alien, not truly French (although he is, like Mr. Polanski, a French citizen). Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, Trelkovsky internalizes his neighbors' view of him, and winds up totally alienated from himself: barking mad, in fact. At one point late in the film, he looks across the courtyard and sees his own face staring back at him from a dirty window.

Mr. Polanski plays his role in "The Tenant" with almost unseemly conviction — a conviction whose source, it's tempting to speculate, might lie in his fugitive childhood, in the wartime experience of a Polish Jew forced to think of himself as an alien in his own country. This is the performance of a man who knows, in the most minute emotional detail, what it's like not to feel at home.

The distance between the tortured interior landscape of a Polanski hero like Trelkovsky and the blasted terrain of Nazi-occupied Warsaw is not vast. And in the achingly precise images of "The Pianist" we feel in their purest form the emotions — of the fugitive, the exile, the outcast — that give Roman Polanski's best work its formidable power to unnerve: the fear bordering on paranoia; the oppressive sense of confinement; the desperation and the fatigue generated by the struggle to maintain a fragile identity in a hostile world.

SINCE most of us are not as acutely or as persistently aware of those hour-of-the-wolf feelings as Mr. Polanski's characters typically are, he has often had to place his tormented protagonists in pretty outré contexts to make their extreme emotional states dramatically plausible. That's why, I think, he has so frequently invoked the supernatural — in "Rosemary's Baby," of course, and in "The Fearless Vampire Killers" (1967) and "The Ninth Gate" as well. (And, come to think of it, in "Macbeth," whose witches are close kin to Rosemary's neighbors.) And why, too, so many of his films have been chronicles of madness: "Repulsion," in which Catherine Deneuve, a virginal French girl left home alone in London by her older sister, goes homicidally insane; "The Tenant," clearly; and the tense, disturbing "Death and the Maiden," in which Sigourney Weaver plays a woman who, having survived political torture, remains permanently, incurably, ill at ease in the world, and who finds herself, in the end, on the brink of committing murder.

In "The Pianist," however, no otherworldly power is needed to explain the hero's overwhelming loneliness and dread, and if, at the end of his years of running and hiding, Wladyslaw Szpilman (played exquisitely by Adrien Brody) seems half-mad, it's an insanity fully justified by his circumstances: Nazi-occupied Poland is a paranoid fantasy grotesquely come to life.

Although Roman Polanski did not invent Wladyslaw Szpilman, and the screenplay, by Ronald Harwood, is extraordinarily faithful to the pianist's memoirs, the movie's Szpilman is, in a way, the ultimate Polanski hero. He is solitude incarnate.

For daringly long stretches of "The Pianist," Mr. Polanski simply contemplates the spectacle of a man alone, as starkly and as irreducibly alone as a human being can be. Szpilman's solitude, though absolute, is not monotonous. It seems to have different colors, shadings, subtle dynamics; it's an organism with a life of its own. At times, we see a rapt, contented sort of solitude, as in our first view of Szpilman, playing Chopin in a glassed-in Warsaw radio studio in 1939. There's another solitude, whose dominant feature is uncomplicated relief, as when the musician, having escaped from the ghetto, takes furtive tenancy of a small apartment on the other side of the wall. Because he cannot venture outside any of his hiding places, and depends on others to bring him food, there are times when the only salient facts of his aloneness are hunger and thirst — the panicky solitude of an animal abandoned in its cage. And there are times, many times, when the world outside his windows is noisy with screams and bombs and gunfire — when he's merely alone with a bone-deep fear of death.

The uncanny depth and richness of the serial solitudes we experience in "The Pianist" are attributable in part to the respect Mr. Polanski maintains for his hero's private grief. Szpilman's memoir, which was written immediately after the war, is strikingly reticent on one important subject: he doesn't let the reader into his thoughts about his father, his mother, his brother and his two sisters, all of whom he saw for the last time on earth as they boarded a German transport from the ghetto in 1942. The movie doesn't presume to tell us what Szpilman himself wouldn't, or couldn't.

And that's the correct choice, morally and aesthetically. Every scene in which we see Wladyslaw Szpilman alone is haunted by the absence of his family, by the unspoken anxiety he must feel for them as well as for himself. The movie shows us, in its swift opening scenes, that Szpilman is by nature something of a loner, an artist who, like many of his kind, has chosen to reduce his life to its essentials: the people he loves and music. And in his years of hiding, the absence of music haunts his solitary moments, too. Every now and then, maybe two or three times in all, Mr. Polanski's camera catches the hero fingering as if involuntarily, some unheard nocturne, playing a phantom piano in a dimming chamber of his memory. So when Szpilman, gaunt, bearded and wild-eyed, gets to play a real piano near the end of the film, the scene isn't about the redemptive power of music, or any such generalized notion. It's about a man remembering, after years of savagely enforced forgetting, who he is.

Wladyslaw Szpilman survived (he died in 2000, at the age of 88), which means that he was, unlike most of Roman Polanski's heroes but very much like Mr. Polanski himself, a lucky man. In Mr. Polanski's pictures, fate tends not to be friendly, and those who believe most firmly that they are its masters, like Macbeth and the lone-wolf private eye Jake Gittes in the noir classic "Chinatown" (1974), end up its stunned victims. The director's own life has given him ample reason to doubt the benevolence of fortune: his mother died in Auschwitz; his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson "family" in 1969. He has spent the last 25 years as a fugitive from American justice, having fled the country in 1977 after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with an under-age girl in Los Angeles.

Yet he, too, has survived. In his speech accepting his seat in the Académie des Beaux Arts, Mr. Polanski said, "I often ask myself what's more important in a director's career — talent or perseverance?" I think it's fair to say that this director's body of work has demonstrated both, along with a consistency of vision that makes nonsense of the popular idea that "The Pianist" represents some kind of comeback.

I'm sure Mr. Polanski is gratified that he's now winning awards for an individual movie (among the top honors, the Palme d'Or at Cannes and best film from the National Society of Film Critics), prizes that do not deliver a coded message that it's time to hang up his viewfinder. But in a sense these are awards for career achievement, too, because this film seems to contain the essence of every film Roman Polanski has ever made, the sum of all his solitary effort. "The Pianist" is the movie he's been rehearsing for his whole life.  

Terrence Rafferty is a critic at large for G.Q. magazine.