Presented at the Sundance Festival, Jakub Piątek’s feature-length documentary is more than just a story about the Chopin Competition and its participants. ‘Pianoforte’ is above all a story about the price of success and the bitterness of failure, as well as the obsession with perfection. The film nominated for an award in the prestigious World Cinema Documentary Competition.
There are six of them. All young and infernally talented. Alexander Gadjiev and Leonora Armellini live in Italy, Hyuk Lee came to Warsaw from South Korea and Hao Rao from China. Eighteen-year-old Eva Gevorgyan is competing in the Chopin Competition as a student from a conservatory in Moscow, and Marcin Wieczorek represents the Bydgoszcz Music Academy. They were all among an elite group of 87 musicians qualified to take part in the Chopin Competition. They came to win, driven by dreams of big contracts, prestigious concerts and albums released on the world’s most respected labels. Confined in their hotel rooms, they practise 8-12 hours a day so as not to make even the slightest mistake during the rehearsal. But only one of them can win. Are the others therefore doomed to failure?
In his documentary Jakub Piątek seeks to answer this question, and his Pianoforte is a tribute to dedication and passion. In choosing the six musicians he follows in his film, the director made a deal with them: they are together through thick and thin. He didn’t bet on winners, but looked for interesting people. His Pianoforte is therefore not a film about musical celebrities. Piątek’s protagonists appear to us as ordinary young people, only that they are gifted with great talent and devote themselves wholeheartedly to their passion. The director of Prime Time looks at the unusual relationship between Hao Rao and his teacher, tries to peep under the mask of perfectionism behind which young Eva hides her emotions, stands shoulder to shoulder with Marcin when he wants to resign from the competition, and watches as the witty Leonora tries to take the pressure off herself by playing the role of a cynical careerist.
Drawing their portraits, Piątek does not stop at documentary observation. In his film, we also see archival footage of the first competitions, children’s rehearsals and the beginning of the bumpy road that led the young musicians to Warsaw in A.D. 2021. The archival footage incorporated in Pianoforte is striking, lending the film emotional power. Thanks to it, we can feel how great the stakes are in this struggle.
In his film, Piątek creates an image of a competition as a metaphor for life, in which failure – or at least the lack of victory – is a common experience. There can be only one winner, and the number of places on the podium is limited. But in Piątek’s film, more important than the official victory is the journey that everyone takes to reach their own summit.
But Pianoforte is not reassuring, not comforting. For it is a poignant story about the obsession with perfection, about the cult of excellence prevailing in the contemporary world. Watching the characters’ twenty-one-day adventure with the Warsaw Competition, we become hostages of their fears, ambitions and invested hopes. Pianoforte turns out to be in this sense a cruel, almost physically painful experience. For although the characters try to rationalise their emotions, neither they nor we are able to dissociate ourselves from them. Everyone has to face their own pain and the bitterness of failure.
Pianoforte is an exceptional documentary. It is sufficient to say that this is the first time in the history of the Chopin Competition that a film crew has been allowed by the organisers to go behind the scenes of the event for such a long time and observe the participants so closely. Piątek and his collaborators made excellent use of this opportunity, getting close to their protagonists, thanks to which their film is not just another reportage on a famous event, but an authorial documentary and a collection of portraits drawn with sensitivity and tenderness.
The scale of the production is also exceptional: the shooting of the documentary took place in Warsaw, Italy, Korea and Russia, among others, and seven languages are spoken on screen. If we consider that the film was shot during the coronavirus pandemic, it is easy to imagine the constraints the young filmmakers had to face: the director and cinematographer Filip Drożdż and the sound engineers Anna Rok, Michał Fojcik and Joanna Popowicz. The result of their work turned out to be a moving, thoroughly precise film. Pianoforte is a documentary in which the sensitivity of observation goes hand in hand with the power of the filmmaker’s reflections, and the story of six musicians turns into a moving metaphor of the contemporary world.
The Polish premiere of Pianoforte took place at the Doc Against Gravity festival.
Pianoforte, directed by Jakub Piątek. Cinematography: Filip Drożdż. Editing: Urszula Piątek-Klimek. Sound: Anna Rok, Michał Fojcik and Joanna Popowicz. Production: Telemark. Polish premiere: 20.01.2023.
