El pianista

No matter how you look at it, this film has masterpiece written all over it. From the brilliant screenplay of this previously deemed unadaptable novel to the art direction to the superb performances, THE PIANIST is a gem. A very Catalan story about two Barcelona classical pianists who fall in love with the same woman in the midst of the bloody Spanish Civil war, the film is a model of the perfect screen adaptation of an epic novel spanning nearly five decades. The art direction, strong acting, character development, meticulous attention to details including the memorable score, and the use of the regional Catalan language, instead of the more mainstream (but potentially less realistic) use of Castillian Spanish are but a few of the touches that makes THE PIANIST a triumph in movie making nobody should miss.

Given that the film deals with two possible roads that the life of an artist can take -based on his attitude towards the political environment- the possibilities of a great plot were immense... El pianista has interesting characters and could have built them in a deeper and more consistent way, but instead, they spent too much time mounting a parody in Paris or a "Felliniesque" encounter at a roof in Barcelona. These wasted times didn't allow the main plot to fully develop.