Product: La Pianiste (Original French Version)
Rating: 3.0
A Little Off-Key
Yikes. Where do I begin? Usually, I love watching foreign films, because they tend to rely more on telling a good story rather than special effects and big names. But I'm sorry to have to say that I was very disappointed with this one. "The Piano Teacher" revolves around a sexually repressed piano teacher who never smiles, and who is very icy with everyone, including a young man who, for some odd reason, claims to love her. She still lives with her nosy, sometimes intolerable mother in a small apartment, and sometimes you get the impression they hate each other. This woman also likes to go to porn shops to watch porn videos, and she likes to watch young couples getting hot-and-heavy at drive-in movies. A lot of this film's content is racy... Even though some scenes are, well, deserving of being un-rated, they are not done pornographically. After all, this is an artsy French film. It wasn't so much the racy content that bothered me, but more of how it was executed. By the end of the film, I was frustrated. The piano teacher treats this young man horribly, and freaks him out when she gives him a list of violent things she wants him to do to her doing sex. He, of course, isn't amused by this, but I spent the entire film wondering why he even loved her in the first place.I kind of wanted to give this film one star, because I found a lot of it to be very disturbing. However, I can't because the movie is not a bad movie. The acting is superb, and the story, though not my cup of tea, is still a powerful, tragic story of a woman with some real problems. And of course, the music is great. So while it is not for everyone, it is an okay foreign film, so long as you're not looking for a feel-good one.