Product: La Pianiste (Original French Version)
Rating: 1.0
only the french would call this "art"
No matter how edgy or avant garde you might think you are, you may find this movie disturbingly creepy. I personally wish I had not seen it, as it gave me nightmares. The central character is a repressed musician who never made the big time. Her pushy stage mother resents that both their lives were utterly wasted in the pursuit of stardom that did not happen, and she takes all her rage and disappointment out on the hapless daughter who is now an aging old maid herself. They made a lot of sacrifices, and now they live together, miserable, lonely, sex-starved, and barely making it on the daughter's paycheck as a piano teacher. All the sexual repression is really quite nauseating, and the daughter expresses her angst by physically cutting herself, watching porno movies with perverted men and doing filthy things in sex shops. Ultimately, she gets involved in a truly gnarly relationship with a young, handsome student who has no clue how to handle the truly deep-seated and deranged perversions of this older woman. The end totally grossed me out, and I am really suprised an actress of the stature of Isabelle Hupert could rationalize this work as "art".