Roman Polanski’s best movies—Rosemary’s Baby, Repulsion, Chinatown—are all about dread and mistrust. But up until now he’s never made a film about the part of his personal history that very likely caused that rare affinity with dark material, namely his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. He’s wanted to film it his whole career, but never found the right vehicle until now. The Pianist is based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a concert pianist who, with the rest of his family, barely escaped death at the Treblinka camp . It’s a story Polanski surely resonated with, having lost his mother at Auschwitz. And like Szpilman, Polanski hid in the ghetto with the help of compassionate strangers. The Pianist is being hailed as his best film in years, netting the Palm D’Or at this year’s Cannes, despite some complaints about coldness of tone. That doesn’t strike us as a problem—Polanski at his peak was a master of icy detachment; it’s his way of framing horror.
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