In my
previous entry I
discussed musical performance in Letter From An Unknown
Woman, Max Ophüls's 1948 classic about a woman's life-long obsession
for a mediocre pianist. In particular, I observed how little realistic the
scenes with Louis Jourdan at the piano were – a strange thing indeed, at least
to a modern sensibility, for a film where musical talent plays so huge a role
in the story. Ophüls replaced Jourdan with a hand double whenever possible, but
he couldn't avoid exposing the actor's incompetence at the keyboard in a
crucial scene.
Let's jump
forward half a century to Roman Polanski's ultra famous 2002 drama The
Pianist. Set during WWII, it tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a
Polish-Jewish pianist (played by an emaciated Adrien Brody) who escapes
deportation to the extermination camp of Treblinka. Polanski, a Holocaust
survivor himself, based the film on Szpilman's own book of memoirs, first published
in 1946 and later in 1998.
