Product: La Pianiste (Original French Version)
Rating: 1.0
The Piano Teacher - A Study in Self-Hatred
Superbly acted by Huppert, but couldn't get past the painful granularity of a character that leaves the viewer no choice but to despise her. Her passive-aggressive sadism towards others is born out of the hatred she has for herself. Among the physical abuse she commits against herself in various ways, she also commits the worst kind of betrayal - a teacher who hates her own pupils to the point of committing acts of violence against them - no one is safe around her - she hates all equally. She pours broken glass into a student's coat pocket out of some senseless deranged jealousy, thus completely destroying that student's hope for a career as a pianist. As equally as she doles out the psychological and physical abuse (there is a revolting scene of some sort of bizarre sexual attack she commits against her own mother, whom she sleeps with in the same bed), she also demands to be abused. She asks her student-boyfriend to beat her (and he obliges, seemingly with some regret) but that can't compare with how much she hates herself.Instead of caring about this character, I found myself disgusted by her (mostly because of her own weakness and unwillingness to change). This woman puts on an air of strength, stoicism, and intelligence, but it is really just a cover for her weakness as a person devoid of any conscious. She is too weak to break the sick relationship she has with her dominating mother, so her life is a gradual escalation of a psychosis that she allows to destroy her. She is a dangerous, sociopathic individual with no hope, so the entire film becomes a disturbing examination of that, and doesn't offer anything else.