Anthony Chase

After 18 years, I finally saw this film. Polanski thought his Polish background profoundly shaped his visual sensibility and that seems to be the most important reason this film is a coherent and unified way of looking at the Holocaust as a lived experience. It also is the Nazi nightmare I have had all my life which came from somewhere but is a product of more than just embedded shades of muddy gray from The Pawnbroker, grainy documentary footage from Eichmann in Jerusalem, and images from in side the train cars that come from a place on which I cannot place a finger. Along with the Russian Roulette scenes from Deer Hunter and a couple other examples from films I'd as soon not remember, Polanski's images of annihilated buildings and streets in Warsaw were as evocative as similar pictures from the initial phase of the recent/ongoing War in Syria (especially the ones without people) and express a sense of utter pain and human sorrow that looks and feels 'original' -- a Polanski gift. Otherwise, a humanist intent behind piano keys and bright impressionist color film here achieve as little as they do in the modest Kidman, Cluny vehicle about the Yugoslavian break-up.