Cul-de-Sac, one of the earlier films made in English by Roman Polanski, takes a very unusual ride into the human psyches of people living alone in an isolated space, not too different from films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, and Knife in the Water. What those films share in common is a sense of tight space that the central characters can’t get out of and we must always follow them within whatever space they go. Polanski’s films have varied from frightening, claustrophobic thrillers to more sensual, darkly comic dramas like this one for example. Cul-de-Sac leans a great deal on the comical side, despite the fact that it’s about a couple being held hostage in their own castle by an armed criminal. However, the situation is not played out in a very suspenseful tone for much of the first half, since the characters of the husband and wife and their unwelcome guest spend the whole night and the next day going through a series of comical mishaps and self-pitying conversations about how miserable their lives have been. Donald Pleasance is so neurotically eccentric as the middle-aged husband George whose younger and more beautiful wife Teresa is more outspoken and disappointed in him, made all the more clear by her infidelity at the beginning of the film as she makes out with a man closer to her age. Because of how idiotic and outrageous they come off as, they don’t play the roles of helpless terrified victims that people would expect to see in hostage thrillers. The criminal Dickie himself is hardly intimidating and scary, given that he behaves in a very drunk and gruff manner, although we know he’s armed and there is a feeling of dread beneath his humor that he could shoot the couple any time if they don’t cooperate with him. At the same time, he also looks embarrassed to be sharing the space with this annoying couple and has to spend the whole night until his crime boss arrives to escort him out of this lonely isolated castle by the sea.
It makes the relationship between a normal couple and a dangerous criminal lighthearted and outrageous for much of the film, particularly when Teresa’s family comes to visit and the criminal has to pretend to be the servant and face all the obnoxious demands of the classy people. It isn’t until after the relatives leave and Dickie is back to keeping the couple under wraps that the suspense builds as he intends to remain in the castle until his boss arrives. It’s after Teresa recklessly lights paper in between his toes and provokes his anger that a serious display of violence is depicted when Dickie whips the wife and smacks her several times, the first moment we see a woman being brutalized. This is one of the many elements in Polanski’s films that regards him depicting victimization in some form, whether it’s men or women. Once Dickie is forced to threaten George and Teresa with his gun, it’s only by that climax that it’s dark yet still comic to some degree when Teresa stole the gun from under Dickie’s nose and gave it to George who can’t handle it right. George is too clumsy to handle a gun that he ends up mortally wounding the crook, causing him to panics and hesitates on what to do with his body while his wife keeps pushing to do something. When she realizes how weak he is to take action, she decides to run away with another man who came by the castle earlier and that displays her ultimate rejection of him in a sudden rush. The husband is left a broken man and sits alone on a rock on the beach, appearing very somber, now that he is truly alone in this desolate place. It’s here where it takes a tragic-comic twist and this comically neurotic man has nothing left for him.
Rather than be just another hostage thriller that most mainstream viewers are familiar with in modern Hollywood, Cul-de-Sac shows more interest in the relationships of human beings, civilian and criminal alike, as they prove to be equally flawed and comical without having a helpless victim and evil villain as the two forces. It thus falls into category with Polanski’s other films, which spend a great deal on the psychology of characters living together in isolation, which occupies his films until they reach a very serious climax. In Rosemary’s Baby, he spent a great deal elaborating on Rosemary’s relationships with her husband and neighbors as they live in the same apartment, up until she starts to suspect that they’re involved in a Satanic plot against her unborn child. Knife in the Water spends a great deal with a middle-class couple and a young man on a sailboat, chatting and growing very tense with one another until it leads to a mishap near the end of the ride. Death and the Maiden takes place entirely in a house by the sea as a woman and her husband spend the entire night holding a doctor hostage and try to get him to confess to crimes she believed he committed against her. The more time Polanski spends in a certain space, whether it’s a place of housing or a body of water, with a limited number of characters within the space, the more he brings a feeling of isolation and confusion as it builds up the tension to where these relationships will lead and what drastic events will occur, however comical, violent, or frightening they become. Cul-de-Sac was one of his earlier films that elaborated on the darkly comical relationships of flawed human beings, stuck in a castle together, building on suspense and humor that made it one of his kookier films of his career. His films after Cul-de-Sac grew more dark and serious, especially when he got to The Pianist and depicted his personal memories of the Holocaust through another survivor. Still, Cul-de-Sac remains unique as a film of Polanski’s that doesn’t fail to intrigue with its bizarre characters and comical situations and keeps the tension high as it follows his style of unpredictability in his filmic structure.
Repulsion is one of the more nightmarish films of Polanski’s career, which fits in as being the first film of his so-called “Apartment” trilogy, followed by Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant. After seeing those last two films first, I saw how Repulsion was the first to start a pattern of depicting a troubled person, living alone in a dark apartment with eccentric neighbors and a paranoid mind. If Rosemary’s Baby was about a woman’s fear of witchcraft and The Tenant was about a man’s fear of murder-suicide, then Repulsion is about a woman’s fear of sex and her inability to connect with people intimately.
The central character of the film Carol, played by Catherine Deneuve, is so quiet and reserved around people and with herself, hardly smiling or laughing, clearly depressed and lonely without attempting to connect or even touch people. The first time a man named Colin kisses her, she cowers and flees indoors, washing her mouth out from the touch of a man’s lips. This gives one of her signs of “repulsion” at the sexual touch of men and the tendency to look at sexual intimacy as a pathway to abuse. The way she keeps looking out the window at the nuns in the convent next door implies she has a longing and respect for them because they represent chastity and purity, which she cannot find in relationships with men. It’s never clearly explained why she restricts herself from and cringes at the sight of anything sexual, although we see her as a young girl in a photograph, standing distant and from her family and looking with a frown on her face. This may give a clue to her past to explain that she has a problem connecting with people, although she clings to her older sister and doesn’t want her to go on a vacation with her married boyfriend, who Carol despises. This shows that her best chance at intimacy are with women, also shown during her work hours at the beauty saloon, where she has a lighthearted moment with one of her female co-workers and laughs with her about a movie she saw. Yet up until that moment and afterwards, she still cannot really open or speak her mind to people. Whenever anyone asks her what’s wrong as they notice her somber and quiet, she avoids any response other than faintly saying nothing’s wrong. Whatever the problem is with her life, she can never explain it to people, least of all to men. The tracking shots of Carol walking along the streets of London, with 60s pop music playing non-diegetically, shows how empty and distant she is towards her surroundings and how alone she is in the world. This atmosphere makes the film appear at first as a melodrama about a woman’s feelings and need for connection. However, as it progresses into its second act, the struggle of this woman’s psyche becomes more terrifying and nightmarish.
As she spends most of her days in the apartment alone while her sister is away, Carol’s sanity and isolation begins to drive her towards a horrific series of erotic and disastrous delusions that begin to catch on her biggest fears. Whenever she goes to bed, she imagines a man coming into her room and sexually assaulting her in bed, in which all the sound goes out and we can only see her traumatized expressions as men gang up on her brutally. This is where we are seeing her worst fears being displayed as she imagines the opposite sex as dirty and abusive, which points closer to the answer to why she is so distant from men. Every morning, a telephone rings and no one speaks when Carol answers it, which is never explained, unless it’s another delusion. However, the fact that we can’t hear anyone speak is to imply that someone is stalking her and just wanting to hear the sound of her voice. That can only play further on her paranoia and assumptions about men, especially at the moment where Colin comes to the apartment one night, begging to make love to her, before she beats his head in with a candlestick. This pushes the film into a darker and scarier area as we see the deranged and violent side of a woman who lives in fear of men and seems driven to hurt them any moment they lean onto her. This act of murder shows her fearful nature in a more extreme manner as she kills a man before he does anything to imply rape or abuse. He is a man who in his spare time can’t stop thinking of her and only wants to reach out, although he barely knows her and may be just trying to unleash his sexual longings. Still, he’s full of sympathetic qualities and seemed to feel concerned about her fragile and depressive state that he wanted to connect with her, which made me we wish he and Carol could have made peace and gotten along to soothe her psychological problems. It’s mainly Carol acting upon paranoia than anything logical when she kills him, but it does reveal how traumatic it is for a woman if she had any previous experience with sex and felt abused in some way. It’s like a horrific revenge film for women who hate being taken advantage of by men, which makes Carol appear as a role model for female purity and liberation. However, as she is consumed more and more by her nightmares and delusions of hands coming out of the wall to grab her, she is far from being a sane, reliable heroine.
Her behavior and reactions to the world around her are defined by paranoia and coldness that she appears more broken and disturbed than any other female character Roman Polanski ever portrayed in his films. She is more irrational than Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby and less heroic as Faye Dunaway in Chinatown; she is a broken woman seeking revenge against the opposite sex and will do so by any means, however delusional and paranoid she grows. The more the walls crack around her, the more the film shows how her sanity and world is breaking apart and that her own home is trying to swallow her up for all the isolation she has made use of from staying within its walls. She leaves a raw rabbit on a plate without ever cooking it and letting flies eat on the carcass. It’s shows how she is allowing her life around her to wither and devour her for not taking control of her life and letting it pass her by. Her daily life is centered on walking amidst this quiet and tight space, breaking a cracker and staring out the window, hardly truly spending time with anyone but herself. This eerie space provides the film with a gloomy and depressing inside look at her mind, as though the apartment is her mind and she is unable to open it up and see anything deeply and intimately outside of these surroundings.
However, her fate is completely uncertain by the very end, after she has killed two men and has fallen into a frozen state, with all the neighbors and her sister staring down at her in concern. What is most moving about the final scene is where her sister’s boyfriend Michael picks her up and carries her out of the room, a sign of real charity and warmth from a man towards a woman. It contrasts the tension that existed between the two at the beginning and he is capable of showing compassion towards a woman. The shot of him carrying her away out the door is then blocked by darkness and the camera tracks across the room at all of Carol’s valuables and the messes she left in the apartment, such as the dead rabbit, a broken cracker, and last of all the photograph of her as a girl with the family. This time, the camera zooms closer into the picture and we can see her looking uncomfortable at an older man looking at her. This gives a clue as to how she must feel disturbed about the signs of sexual feelings, as it appears that this man, who may have been her father or a relative, could have used her and has traumatized her ever since. It zooms closer into her face and finally into her eyes, ending the film with this last sight of a depressed girl who was clearly uncomfortable around men since this experience as a girl and it juxtaposes this fear of men with the warmth Michael shows her as he carried her out. Together, this brings Polanski’s vision of a woman’s disturbed psyche to a very bittersweet close as we are left with no clear answers of Carol’s past or her future, only more troubling questions, even though they all relate to the relationship between the two sexes. This is one of those films in Polanski’s career that takes time with focusing on character, with very little dialogue and open expressions, before the darkness and horror begins to rise up and swallow her. The more it spends on this young woman’s loneliness in her apartment and distance from people of the outside world, he creates a disturbing and bleak horror film with no exploitative or gory sights, but something more uncomfortable and frightening that relates to a person’s life in loneliness with a world they can’t reach out to and can make them feel broken and insane.
Chinatown is definitely a much straighter film than Polanski’s earlier films and is not filled with the same bizarre and creepy elements as Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, or Cul-de-Sac. It was one of the two films he made in Hollywood and was also hired as a director by Robert Evans, the second time after Rosemary’s Baby, so it was more like he was applying his directing style to a film from another source, in this case, Robert Towne’s original screenplay. It was an easier film to follow than his earlier works given that it’s a detective mystery that needed to have all the secrets and loose ends tied up, whereas his other films usually kept a lot of questions unanswered. Still, he made it as a very gritty and complex film with a very cynical and pessimistic look at society that was in line with his other films. Chinatown’s most defining characteristics that relate to Polanski’s technique in film include the focus on a first-person perspective, a destructive relationship between the sexes, the danger of sex itself, and a very bleak conclusion about life.
Throughout this film, the first-person perspective is that of private eye, Jake “J.J.” Gittes (Jack Nicholson), as he investigates a mystery that he didn’t want to get thrown into from the beginning, but which he immerses himself into once he gets in over his head about something he doesn’t fully understand. Everything witnessed on the film is shown from his point of view so that we can follow him up until the mystery is unveiled. The time spent with Gittes is taken seriously and humorously whenever he behaves nosy and slick with his crime-solving techniques, yet at the same time we can see that the crime he is trying to solve is bigger than he thinks and that there is a tension on the rise for how he can get out of this case alive – or even get someone else out alive. The more uncertain and reckless he gets with his methods of snooping into forbidden information or makes an enemy out of bureaucracy, he becomes unreliable at times because he hasn’t that smart to know what’s at risk. He falls in line with the main characters in Polanski’s other films, which are curious and irrational at the same time about their surroundings and make a bad call on the way they try to make sense of it all. Gittes gets his nose slit, gets into fights with farmers, causes a scene at a retirement home, and slaps Faye Dunaway’s character Evelyn Mulwray for information. All these moments expose him as a flawed man who is not out to make a good impression on people, but since he’s involved in a case that is filled with corruption and lies, we have no choice but to follow him and let him have his way. He needs to act quickly and rough in order to find the answers quickly, although he’s not exactly a muscle man who can overpower his enemies. His past experiences in Chinatown have broken him, where his efforts as a policeman led him to no success when he tried too hard on a case that he didn’t have a full understand of. Now that he’s throwing himself in a new case that’s full of deceit and murder, his life and limb are put higher on the line, mostly noticed by his bandaged nose as a sign of him as a wounded warrior. His mind and wit are what work for him to investigate the mystery and Jack Nicholson makes him very sharp-mouthed, slick, and charming enough to remind audiences of a Humphrey Bogart-type of detective who can seduce the ladies and outwit the villains. The challenge for this character is that his charm and wit are facades for a man who suffered a great loss in Chinatown because of not getting all the facts in good shape to protect a woman from getting hurt. He still maintains his demeanor to help him get through the job because he clearly doesn’t like to be embarrassed or displayed as weak, which he’s clear about when telling Evelyn that he’s not the “one who is supposed to be caught with his pants down”. In that way, he’s trying to solve the case to avoid any disgrace on his career without letting any sentiments get in the way, up until he has a sexual encounter with Evelyn and feels intimate with her in that one moment. Once again, he’s getting emotionally involved with a woman he’s trying to help and is in danger of screwing up again like he did in Chinatown.
When it comes down to putting the woman in danger, Polanski has usually made the female characters in his films as victims in some way, whether by a sign of abuse or unhappiness, which arises from their relationships to men. Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion is a traumatized and depressed woman who is uncomfortable in the presence of men out of fear of rape and abuse. Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby suspects that she is a pawn in a Satanic plot against her unborn child and has a very dream-like sequence where she is raped by Satan and apparently is carrying his child. For Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, she is a femme fatale who appears to be hiding something dark from Gittes and could be the prime suspect in her husband’s death. However, as she slowly begins to come off as a victim of a traumatizing event from her past, she is another example of a woman in Polanski’s films who has been brutalized or tormented and doesn’t have anyone to rely on. She clearly doesn’t trust Gittes all too well because she won’t reveal the whole truth of what is making her nervous about her father, Noah Cross, and her dead husband. She seems uneasy about sharing her secrets with him and that furthers the complicated relationship between a man and a woman that Polanski has explored before, from the unhappily married couple in Cul-de-Sac to the seemingly happy yet deceitful relationship in Rosemary’s Baby. Some of the sexual tension in his films is also defined by age differences, such as the awkward tension between the young man and the older married woman in Knife in the Water to the age distance between Mia Farrow and John Cassavettes in Rosemary’s Baby to the young woman-older man relationship between Isabelle Adjani and Polanski’s character in The Tenant. There is some sense of unease between the people of age boundaries, yet it takes a darker step with Chinatown as we learn the dark secret of Evelyn’s past with her father after we learn that he raped her when she was 15 and begot a daughter from her. Long before we uncover the secret, we see the daughter in a seemingly romantic affair with Evelyn’s husband when Gittes spies on them after being told they’re in an affair. It’s uncertain if the relationship was sexual between Evelyn’s husband and daughter, yet it’s the opposite of the incestuous relationship between her and her father in that Hollis Mulwray was clearly trying to look after the daughter and protect her from the evil father. It still creates a rather uneasy feeling of a relationship between a man and a woman of different ages and frighteningly mirrors Polanski’s own history with young women and eventually his sex scandal with a 13-year-old girl that he has been notoriously known for. Of course, Polanski’s own personal tragedy of losing a woman may have had an influence on the way he decided to Chinatown on a bleak note.
Despite protests by the writer Robert Towne over the ending of the film, Polanski strongly aimed for the ending in which Gittes’ crime-solving techniques lead him to a drastic conclusion right in the place of Chinatown, where most of his past mistakes in policing had come out in the open. Rather than take Towne’s idea of a happy ending, Polanski chose to kill off Evelyn allow her horrible father Noah Cross get away with his crimes. As she attempts to keep her father away from the girl, she tries to be strong and hold a gun against him. However, it’s an attempt in vain as flees in the car with her daughter and is then shot through the eye by one of the police. She has been wrongfully accused of killing her husband and the police will not listen to Gittes’ discovery that Cross was the murderer that their attempts to stop her end in her death. The horrific sight of her dead body with the bloody eye and the piercing cries of her daughter brings a very tragic feel to the end of the film that parallels a sense of bleakness in Polanski’s earlier films. The idea that a victim cannot escape the evils of corruption and crime reflects a very cynical edge to Polanski’s films in how he makes a person appear helpless and unable to break free of their torments. Now that Evelyn is dead, Gittes is left with further torments to go through, ever since his tragic mistakes in Chinatown. The fact that Polanski lost his own wife, Sharon Tate, at the hands of the Manson Family a few years before making this film must have had an influence on choosing to the end the film on this tragic note. It fits in with the trauma of Gittes’ past that he faces another tragedy within Chinatown, after getting involved in solving a crime in which he’s dealing with corrupt bureaucrats that he has no control over and doesn’t prepare himself for fighting. When Polanski portrays his characters as damaged and weak to a degree, he hardly has them exit the film with any liberation or hope for their lives. Rather than put them through a journey where their lives are changed for the better, he only finds ways to make their lives get worse and exposed as being disturbed and full of hopelessness. However, just as Polanski suffered a loss that made his life feel worse for a time, he made one of his biggest mistake that put him in even worse conditions.
The fact that this film was released a few years before his statutory rape of Samantha Geimer, I wonder how far Polanski felt he could go in his relationships with young women when he was making a film in which his main female was raped as a teenager, yet nevertheless made the wrong move in a private place on a minor. It was as though he was experiencing exactly what Noah Cross says to Gittes: “Most people never have to face the fact, that at the right time, at the right place, they are quite capable of anything.” We can’t be sure if Polanski felt inspired by that line in how the old man defends himself for what he did to his daughter and it sounds very creepy that Polanski may have felt sympathy for this villainous character. In possibly understanding the nature of evil, he ended up committing a crime that was similar to the crimes he depicted in his movies. Yet rather than put himself in the skin of a murderer, he chose to put himself in the skin of a sexual pervert to get a taste of an attractive young girl and let her go with her life. Because the girl has grown and forgiven him for what he did, she is not as traumatized as the victims he depicted in his films and she possibly could see that there are worse things than sex with a minor. He has remained in Europe without having sex with any other girls, which is to say his sexual assault on Samantha Geimer was a one time thing that he now wishes he could take back and will never repeat again. Yet, there still lingers with him a fascination for young women, especially since he’s been married to a younger attractive woman for two decades. Apparently his interest in young women is reflected in his films whenever he depicts a relationship between men and women of different ages and sometimes shows the darker side of it, particularly in incest between a father and daughter. I wonder that whenever Polanski tackles these issues in his films if he’s doing so out of awareness for his own perverse desires. In his country, he seemed to have felt at liberty to seduce young women and face no backlash for that, so when he came to America, he felt the same liberty and then got into trouble for it. He pleaded not guilty in his case and spent only 41 days in prison, before he fled the country and never returned to this day. Likely he would have been spent more time in jail and then be deported, but Polanski’s self-imposed exile into Europe seemed to be a way of forcibly deporting himself. He has spent the remainder of his life in Europe and likely had relationships with teenage girls, including the star of his film Tess, who was about 15 or 17 when they had an affair during the making of the film. It didn’t get him into trouble, which further makes note of the liberty that Europeans appear to have in pursuing teenagers. Since Samantha Geimer was just beginning her way into teenage-hood, Polanski may have been turned on by her pre-maturity. Since she agreed to pose for Vogue magazine for him, she may have also felt mature enough to have herself be photographed to show off her body, which doesn’t mean it’s her fault that the whole sex thing happened, but girls going into that age become eye candy for the eyes of men. His view on sex and age boundaries just didn’t side with those of the people of America and many people dismiss him as a sick pedophile. Now that he’s back in his homeland, it’s hard for him to give up affections for girls and young women, especially since his wife Emmanuelle Seigner is about 30-something his junior. Yet Polanski continued on making films that addressed issues of sexual abuse and the discomfort of being taken advantage of.
It’s often disturbing to depict, least of all his film adaptation of the play Death and the Maiden, in which the main female Paulina is traumatized by her experience as a hostage of a fascist government and the rape and torture that was inflicted upon her body multiple times. When she finally nabs and ties up the man she believes took part in the dirty methods, Polanski spends much of the film sympathizing from her angle as she recounts to her husband the experience of the torture and nearly breaks down a few times. At the same time, he sympathizes with her hostage, Dr. Roberta Miranda, who continuously denies he ever took part in the torture and rape and pleads with fear to be spared of any torture. So Polanski allows sympathies to exist on both sides, as though he may have felt pity for himself but also for his female victim and personified those dual sides in Paulina and Miranda. By the very end, when Paulina has Miranda knelt before her at the edge of a cliff, she forces him one more time to answer if he raped her, and this time, he admits it and goes into a monologue of how he went about doing it. He sometimes describes it with glee on his face as he talks about how he “enjoyed it” and “didn’t have to be nice” and felt “very sorry that it ended”. He’s confessing with the true honesty of a rapist, one who isn’t talking with too much remorse and isn’t afraid to admit that he enjoyed the process. Perhaps the more he denied it in the interrogation, he didn’t feel guilty enough or have his eyes opened to the real evil of his actions. That sounds closely to how Polanski may have enjoyed his own experience with raping an underage girl and didn’t admit to the public that he did anything wrong. Just like his own life, he lets Miranda go free without being persecuted for his crimes, he lets him go back to his family and we can see him looking down with unease at Paulina during a violin concert. The two people apparently realize at this moment that they will have to co-exist in modern society and live with their past, just as Polanski gets to live the rest of his life in Europe with his mistake while his victim lives with it as well but openly forgives him for it. Polanski must think that whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger and doesn’t provide any real punishment for a rapist and satisfaction for a victim because in time, it’s something they both can eventually put aside and continue on with their lives.
Of course, Polanski has gone through other experiences than just sex scandals to affect the way he makes films, given that he was a victim of the Holocaust, who had to struggle with his time in the concentration camps and then with his escape in Nazi-occupied Poland. He reflects that experience in his Oscar-winning biographical film, The Pianist, about another Holocaust survivor, Wladyslaw Szpilman, who avoided being sent to his death, but ended up losing his family and was left on his own in an unwelcome territory. The suffering his goes through, from the arduous labor camps to his hiding in-and-out of different apartments to his rescue by Allied forces at the end of the war, must bear parallels to Polanski’s own life on the run from the Nazis, running into places where he would be rejected and would have to steal to survive. Because Polanski and Szpilman are both survivors, there is a feeling of hope at the end of the film, something that is not often felt at the end of Polanski’s previous films. Yet survival doesn’t mean that people can ever forget what they went through, which implies further why Polanski provides a bleak and edgy tone to his films out of his own dark experiences. He can never forget what happened to him and so he continues to depict the nature of evil in his films, whether it’s sexual abuse, murder, psychological torture, corruption, conspiracies, or scarring. Sometimes he sympathizes with the evil-doers in his films by making them appear charming and decent, such as the devil-worshippers in Rosemary’s Baby, Noah Cross in Chinatown, and Dr. Miranda in Death and the Maiden. In The Pianist, he made the Nazis very difficult to sympathize with, as it happens commonly in depictions of the Holocaust, and portrays them as merciless, unhinged monsters that always act on murderous and brutal inclinations. The only Nazi who is allowed any kind of humanity in the end is the German captain, Wilm Hosenfeld, who in real life spared Szpilman and didn’t turn him over to the Germans. In that one exception, he shows that were Nazis who still had humanity intact, even though Hosenfeld never lived through his years as a prisoner of war and died before he could ever be pardoned or revealed as saving a Jew’s life. Yet the film shows at the end that Szpilman owes part of his survival to Hosenfeld, despite any role he played in the murders of millions of Jews. It isn’t known whether Polanski feels forgiveness towards the oppressors; he won’t shy away from how wrongful they were and he continues on through his films to show how the wrong-doers are guilty of their crimes by their own fault. The Pianist is definitely the film of his career that defines the evils of totalitarianism and the struggles of the victims without putting in any of the bizarre, darkly comic elements seen in his previous films. It’s a film that people could compare to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List for the harsh depiction of the Holocaust and for shaking up the audience with the sight of horror but also with a sentiment by its ending. It’s one of his straighter films that doesn’t linger on mysteries or ambiguity but shows the hard truth openly to those who didn’t witness the horror and those who witnessed it and live with it today.
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