Product: La Pianiste (Original French Version)
Rating: 2.0
Generally unpleasant, and often worse
A cold, emotionally-repressed piano teacher under the thumb of a domineering mother finds release in a variety of inappropriate, unhealthy ways, including peeping into the car window of a young couple being intimate at a drive-in movie and smelling dirty tissues from the trash can of a porn shop video booth. Apologies for being so graphic, but potential viewers should be alerted about what they're getting here. Eventually, the teacher's actions escalate from the inappropriate and mildly criminal activities described to psychotic episodes including the maiming of one of her students.To be fair, the movie is well acted, somewhat interesting, and never becomes boring (the worst sin of a creative work, in my opinion), but in the end the unpleasantness, grossness and endless depressing scenes outweigh the artistic value of the piece, making the film an ordeal to finish. Obviously, other reviewers here on Amazon feel differently, but this is my take. And, if you check out my other reviews, you'll see that I don't need a film to be light and feel-good to enjoy it.There's a twenty-minute interview with actress Isabelle Huppert on the DVD, where she says that the crux of the film is the main character's desire to be loved in an old-fashioned way ("like something out of a nineteenth century novel") in a world where men only want to seduce her. "Really?" I said to myself, "but how does that explain her desire to be tied up and beaten, as well as the premeditated criminal maiming of her student?" I guess I've gotten out of practice with French cinema from the days when I used to enjoy Truffaut films.