Product: La Pianiste (Original French Version)
Rating: 4.0
A Very Dark Tale!
Being a piano teacher myself, I was very curious about this film. I don't teach in a conservatory, but do know that artists at that level can become very eccentric, and when they feel threatened, they can be vicious. Still, this film took that to the extreme and then some. Erika's relationship with her mother didn't make it any easier to achieve mental health, and her sexual fantansies and perversions drove her deeper into the abyss. By all outward appearances, she was a repressed, uptight bully with most of her students who went home to a quiet life with her equally repressed, bullying mother, but she often sneaked out at night to act out her fantasies. It's when an attractive student takes a romantic interest in her that she decides she can use him to act out her ultimate fantasies of being beaten and abused to an extreme. She controls him cruelly until he agrees to follow through. Some of this is hard to watch, but the film is never judemental, and Erika's humanity is always there. As twisted as she has become, she is never a caricature or a two-dimensional character. This is a very dark, very adult tale that left me a little shaken, as I'm sure was intended.