POLANSKI FEH

I’ve just been reading over Jan Herman’s entry in his “Straight Up” blog, and it’s a very good point to make about Polanski on several levels. For starters, it’s far worse than the concluding scroll of AMERICAN GRAFFITI, where NONE of the female characters are mentioned — a VERY telling oversight on Lucas’s part, and a major feminist scandal of its day. Second, leaving the family’s fate out of both the film AND the credits suits the reading of the flick as a vainglorious self-tribute. Polanski sees his fate as tied up with this pianist because HE got kicked out of Hollywood for stuff everybody else did (sleeping with minors), and he continues to see himself as a victim EVEN AFTER BEDDING HER YOUNGER SISTER. His concern for how he disrupted his girlfriend’s family is NIL. And it fits into our larger dyslexia surrounding the Holocaust in that once we enter that highly-charged zone, reason slips away and we’re grateful simply to sympathize with a single character instead of working to appreciate the enormity of it all. This makes the setup of the family and their trials all the more insulting: why introduce all these characters and their inter-familial politics if only to let them fade POOF into the air?

There’s another angle on the PIANIST that deserves scrutiny: at the end, the main reason the German officer takes pity on “our hero” is that he’s a pianist, and they both sit down to play for one another. The German plays Beethoven. Polanski’s character plays Chopin’s Ballade in g minor, and supposedly impresses the German into silence. And yet the lingering irony is that Beethoven still rules aesthetically, even if a passionate Pole can make the case the “Chopin was no slouch,” or some such. I can’t believe these were random musical choices.