The Piano teacher = La Pianiste [DVD] (E)

Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a repressed middle-aged classical piano teacher in Vienna who lives with her demanding, manipulative mother (Annie Girardot). Erika presents a cool, detached aristocratic demeanor to her students and to the world. But she also leads a masochistic private life: she searches for anonymous sex in pornographic theatres, which in turn leads her to self-destructive acts of self-mutilation to assuage her guilt. When a handsome young music student, Walter (Benoit Magimel), attempts to seduce Erika, his forthright masculinity and her own masochistic desires create an untenable situation for the piano teacher. Erika begins to force her mother to acknowledge the incestuous underpinnings of their destructive relationship and she forces Walter to confront a damaged femininity for which he is unprepared. Michael Haneke’s films have all been defined by a cold detached observation of social breakdown. “The Piano teacher”, based on Elfriede Jelinek’s novel, is a powerful and deeply disturbing film. Huppert’s performance is central to the film’s success. It is a performance of deep courage and she creates one of screen history’s most devastating and unrelenting portrayals of feminine masochism. But this is not only a film about individual sexual dysfunction. For Haneke, Erika’s repression and self-disgust is firmly connected to her passion for the rigours and classicism of European music. The Viennese Conservatory in which she teaches becomes a symbol of highly controlled, repressive bourgeois and aristocratic culture, a culture which demands the inhuman vanquishing of contradiction and emotion. This is a bleakly unsettling film which suggests that built into the very foundations of Western “high art” is an oppressive, vigilant surveillance and repression of excess and desire. Obviously, and not unsurprisingly with its Viennese setting, the film shares a deeply Freudian pessimism about the future of culture. This is not an easy film to watch and it contains extremely disturbing images of sexual self-abuse. It is nevertheless a consistent and unforgettable investigation of Western culture at a point of spiritual collapse. And the film is unimaginable without Huppert whose performance allows us to both understand individual suffering and the wider social and political analogies that Haneke wants to draw through her character. Huppert won the Best Actress Award and Magimel won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for their performances. The DVD interviews with Haneke and Jelinek are outstanding as is the commentary by Huppert.