The Pianist (15) <br></br>The Man Without a Past (12A)

Two of this week's releases offer an extreme illustration of the way that films come in both major and minor keys. One is a large-scale realistic drama about a topic as serious as any that narrative cinema ever attempts to address, by a world-famous director apparently delivering a long-awaited personal testament. The other is a film that would normally be considered marginal – low-budget, undemonstrative and not a little facetious, by a somewhat recondite joker doing much what he usually does. The first is Roman Polanski's Holocaust drama The Pianist; the other a terse comedy-melodrama by wayward Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.

Clearly, there are no earthly grounds for comparing them, although the two films were the front runners in competition at Cannes last year; in the event, Polanski won. It is often implicitly assumed that, by their very nature, films about the Holocaust stand outside usual cinematic criteria; assessing a venture such as The Pianist, it feels inappropriate to ask whether it is done well. Judgements of the film are inevitably further coloured by its director's own history: Polanski survived the Krakow ghetto as a child, yet till now has never addressed that part of his life on screen. The Pianist's fictionalised version of a true episode of the Holocaust gains a special authority from Polanski's personal experience, though whether that authority is equivalent to a special moral weight is another question.

The film is based on the memoir of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a classical pianist who miraculously escaped deportation with his family to the death camps, and whose long, desperate period of solitary hiding came to a happy conclusion through the unlikely intervention of a benevolent German officer. Without a doubt, The Pianist is a major achievement, at least as far as realistic evocation goes: it's hard not to feel that this is exactly how life must have been in the Warsaw ghetto. This is surely the most exhaustive, painstaking screen recreation yet of the place and period (even the faces seem to be straight out of contemporary newsreel), so much so that you're grateful the story does not ask us to follow it into the camps themselves.

Scrupulous historical research and digital effects allow Polanski to recreate the Warsaw ghetto in remarkable scale and detail, occasionally to push the realism into starkly evocative nightmare. In the film's most extraordinary shot (I hesitate to call it beautiful, but in a horrible way it is), the camera rises over a wall to reveal an avenue of snow-covered ruins in a devastated necropolis.

Yet the realism is precisely what is worrying about The Pianist: Claude Lanzmann, who made the exhaustive documentary Shoah, disapproves of fictionalising the Holocaust on screen on the grounds that – as he put it on Radio 4 last week – "to represent is to make representable". Seen in these terms, The Pianist offers an excess of representation. There is nothing Polanski is afraid of showing: a man in a wheelchair thrown out of a window, piles of corpses in flames, the brutalisation of the old and the weak. You recoil, yet the images you feel will stick with you are marked by understatement, absence: a wall at night over which unseen figures toss packages, an empty courtyard strewn with the suitcases of the recently deported.

Polanski observes the horror straight on, but coldly; of course, a film-maker does not simply observe atrocities but stages them, another reason why dramatisations of the Holocaust are by nature problematic. While The Pianist has none of the sentiment or eager naivety that made Schindler's List at once appalling and affecting, its dispassionate control is no less disturbing. It's also surprising how little of Polanski's personality as a film-maker seems to be evident; the film's detachment and mastery somehow place it, if not beyond compassion, then beyond real empathy. The Pianist is an extraordinary achievement, a monument; yet somehow it doesn't seem entirely alive as cinema.

There are awkwardnesses in it too. The English-speaking cast – including Emilia Fox, Frank Finlay and Maureen Lipman – seem to have been directed to speak in stilted cadences, with shades of a Polish accent, as if dubbing themselves. And the ironies in Ronald Harwood's script are carved in lead: "All will be well," says Szpilman's father, and Polanski cuts to stormtroopers marching in. What makes the film magnetic, however, is Adrien Brody's presence in the title role – "presence" rather than performance, since this is one of those cases where an actor gives his body entirely to a role, simply existing on screen rather than acting his way to our attention. As Szpilman is transformed from a dapper, sensitive sophisticate to a haggard troglodyte picking his way through the shadows, Brody himself seems gradually to dwindle to an intense bony core of bird-like, resilient delicacy.

By contrast, you could hardly have a film more unassuming than The Man Without a Past, Aki Kaurismäki's story about a man who is beaten almost to death, loses his memory and rebuilds his life from scratch among a Helsinki community of container dwellers. The film sometimes seems terse to the point of autism, yet Kaurismäki puts his singular personality into every frame. He loves stark compositions of almost comic-book simplicity, he loves Sixties rock'n'roll and creaky tangos, he loves old movies (the film is crammed with echoes of L'Atalante and Fifties B-movie noir) and he loves people who look as if they've knocked around, or been knocked around. Few actors are as distinctively grizzled as Markku Peltola, with Robert Mitchum's taciturnity and a face that's seen a few frosty tundra mornings. Kaurismäki's regular female lead Kati Outinen, with her blank sour-lemon expression, seems not to emote at all, yet the combination of her reticence and Kaurismäki's perfect timing makes her remarkably expressive: when her Salvation Army officer first looks at Peltola, there's not a flicker on her face, yet you instantly know she's smitten.

You half suspect Kaurismäki is taking us for a ride with all the mock gloom, musical interludes and inscrutably Nordic snippets of cod-portentous dialogue. He can't, surely, be serious about having his hero tenderly, solemnly cultivate potatoes? Yet he is, without a shade of phoney sentiment. He's committed to a topic that seems to have fallen out of the movie lexicon: the theme of dignity, meaning cinema's dignity too. Here's a director who stands proudly, grumpily against grandiose, viewer-insulting rhetoric; he's determined to reinvent a pre-lapsarian cinema that communicates as directly, simply and deeply as silent film once did. At first glance, Kaurismäki seems to be doing next to nothing, and doing it as if he didn't especially care; yet The Man Without a Past is one of those genuinely soulful films that make you realise why the art form is, despite everything, worth believing in. Like Kaurismäki's hero, cinema shouldn't be given up for dead.

j.romney@independent.co.uk