Few movies remain with me long after seeing them on wide screen: one of them is Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, whose simplicity and old-fashioned flavor of visuals are stunning, if not refreshing. For a movie about a Polish pianist’s escape from Nazi concentration camps, there is nothing nakedly petrifying beyond the occasional scenes of, say, someone being thrown out of a third-story balcony and such. In fact, with its lack of larger-than-life imagery, a perversely romantic feeling floats through the movie: to begin with, the heart-tugging music of Chopin (Polish, but of course!) presents itself in an environment of gloom. Even the clothes, the shop fronts, the living rooms, and the sunny Polish skies look so accessibly natural they become scary.
Read more on
http://www.paulancheta.com/personal/thoughts/pianist.html