The Pianist

The Pianist

Winner of the prestigious Golden Palm award at the 2002 Cannes film festival, The Pianist is the film that Roman Polanski was born to direct. A childhood survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski was uniquely suited to tell the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew and concert pianist (played by Adrien Brody) who witnessed the Nazi invasion of Warsaw, miraculously eluded the Nazi death camps, and survived throughout World War II by hiding among the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. Unlike any previous dramatization of the Nazi holocaust, The Pianist steadfastly maintains its protagonist's singular point of view, allowing Polanski to create an intimate odyssey on an epic wartime scale, drawing a direct parallel between Szpilman's tenacious, primitive existence and the wholesale destruction of the city he refuses to abandon. Uncompromising in its physical and emotional authenticity, The Pianist strikes an ultimate note of hope and soulful purity. As with Schindler's List, it's one of the greatest films ever made about humanity's darkest chapter. --Jeff Shannon

Genre: Biography, Drama, War
Director(s): Roman Polanski
Production: Focus Features
  Won 3 Oscars. Another 52 wins & 73 nominations.
 
IMDB:
8.5
Metacritic:
85
Rotten Tomatoes:
95%
R (Restricted)
Year:
2002
149
$32,519,322
Website
27,395 Views

Halina:
We could hide the money. Look here. We can hide the money under the flower pots.

Father:
No, no, no, no, I'll tell you what we do. We use tried and tested methods. You know what we did in the last war? We made a hole in the table leg [taps the leg] and hid the money in there.

Henryk Szpilman:
And suppose they take the table away?

Father:
What do you mean, take the table away?

Henryk Szpilman:
The Germans go into Jewish homes and they just take what they want, furniture, valuable, anything.

Mother:
Do they?

Father:
Idiot, what would they want with a table, a table like this? [rips a piece of wood off the table]

Mother:
What on earth are you doing!

Halina:
No, listen. This is the best place for it. No-one would think of looking under the flower pots.

Henryk Szpilman:
No, no, no, listen, listen to me, I've been thinking...

Wladyslaw Szpilman:
Oh, really? That's a change.

Henryk Szpilman:
You know what we do? We use psychology.

Wladyslaw Szpilman:
We use *what*?

Henryk Szpilman:
We leave the money and the watch on the table, and we cover it like this, in full view.

Wladyslaw Szpilman:
[amazed] Are you stupid?

Henryk Szpilman:
The Germans will search high and low, I promise you, they'll never notice!

Wladyslaw Szpilman:
That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen, of course they'll notice it. Look. [takes the violin and a bill, folds it and slips it into the opening of the violin] Look here... idiot.

Henryk Szpilman:
And you call me stupid?

Mother:
No, that is very good, because that is the last place they will ever look.

Henryk Szpilman:
This will take hours!

Mother:
We're not in a hurry, we'll get it back...

Wladyslaw Szpilman:
It won't take hours.

Henryk Szpilman:
How will you get them out? Tell me that, tell me how, I'd like to know, how would you get them out. You take each one out individually...

Halina:
No-one listens to me, no-one.


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