Product: La Pianiste (Original French Version)
Rating: 5.0
Huppert magnificent in the title role of The Piano Teacher
The Piano Teacher shows us a few days in the life of a disturbed woman who is both victim and victimizer. Isabelle Huppert briliantly plays the part of Erika Kohut, a middle-aged piano teacher at a music college in Vienna. Annie Giradot is no less effective as her domineering and watchful mother. The two women abuse one another physically and verbally. This relationship is long standing and comes to a crisis as the film progresses.Erika is unable to break the bonds that attach her to her mother. Instead, like a child who has never grown up, she wants to please her mother, but is driven to act out her own fantasies secretly. Her mother appears to be unaware of the deep seated repression that is consuming her daughter. What she does see is an angry, hateful person who lies to her and deceives her frequently.Erika's sexual frustration takes the form of physical and pschological self-hate. She visits porn shops to degrade herself and she mutilates her body to distract her from the intense psychological pain she suffers constantly.At school her anger takes the form of verbal abuse to her students who are unable to achieve the artistic integrity she demands. What appears to be an inflated sense of her own importance as an artist masks her frustration at being second-rate. She is not good enough to be recognized as an artist in her own right. Her hatred of herself and her inadequacy as an artist prompt her to strike out at students and colleagues alike.Into her seething cauldron of despair comes a young engineering student, Walter Klemmer, wonderfully played by Benoit Maginel, who wants to study Schubert with her. At first she refuses him, but pressure by the school to accept him forces her to work with him. The sexual tension between teacher and pupil is immediately apparent and moves forward to a collision some reviewers have likened to a bad car accident.In the end we see Erika and her student reduced to the lowest common demoninator as human beings. At first Erika is successful at dominating her young student, but the tables are turned as she becomes dependent on him. Both teacher and student are playing a zero sum game to lose. The final climax and its denoument leave Erika a wounded, broken woman.The director, Michael Haneke, elicits finely tuned performances by all the players, particularly Huppert, who is magnificent in the title role. Haneke has made this film for adults only. It is dark and disturbing from beginning to end with moments of pain and violence that are as real as anything one is likely to see on the screen.Huppert as the piano teacher has no redeeming qualities we are able to see in the short space of time covered by the film. Viewers looking for a pleasant and agreeable entertainment are urged to search elsewhere. Haneke shows us a dark side of life and he is unflinching in its portrayal.