La pianiste

Plot synopsis:
Erika Kohut is a piano professor at a Vienna music conservatory. Although already in her forties, she still lives in an apartment with her domineering mother. Her father is a long-standing resident in a psychiatric asylum.
The audience is gradually shown truths about Erika's private life. Behind her assured façade, she is a woman whose sexual repression is manifested in a long list of paraphilia, including (but by no means limited to) voyeurism and sadomasochistic fetishes such as sexual self-mutilation.
When Erika meets Walter Klemmer, a charming 25-year-old engineering student from a middle class background, a mutual obsession develops. Even though she initially attempts to prevent consistent contact and even tries to undermine his application to the conservatory, he eventually becomes her pupil. Like her, he appreciates and is a gifted interpreter of Schumann and Schubert.
Erika destroys the musical prospects of an insecure but talented girl, Anna Schober, driven by her jealousy of the girl's contact with Walter—and also, perhaps, by her fears that Anna's life will mirror her own. She does so by hiding shards of glass inside one of Anna's coat pockets, damaging her right hand and ruining her aspirations to play at the forthcoming jubilee concert. Erika then pretends to be sympathetic when Anna's mother asks for advice on her daughter's recuperation. (The sub-plot of the pupil and her mother, mirroring the main relationship in the film, is absent in Jelinek's novel: Haneke has explained that while the novel relies on flashbacks to Erika's own childhood and her relationship with her mother, he preferred to dramatise a similar mother/daughter relationship in the present.) In a moment of dramatic irony, the girl's mother rhetorically asks Erika who could do something so evil.
Walter pursues Erika into a lavatory immediately after she has secretly ruined her pupil's hand. Walter passionately kisses Erika even though she is rebuffing him. Erika finally responds to his passion, but insists on repeatedly controlling, humiliating and frustrating Walter.
Walter is increasingly insistent in his desire to start a sexual relationship with Erika, but Erika is only willing if he will satisfy her masochistic fantasies, which repulse him. The film climaxes, however, when he attacks her in her apartment in the fashion she let him know she desired, beating and then raping her, outside her mother's bedroom door. He then leaves.
The next day, Erika takes a kitchen knife to the concert where she is scheduled to fill in for the injured Anna. She delays going to the stage because she is desperate to see Walter, but Walter enters cheerful and laughing with his family. Moments before the concert is due to start, Erika stabs herself superficially in the shoulder and exits the concert hall into the street.

Tags: pornographic, cult, psychological, cruelty

Review:
If you think piano teacher Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) in Michael Haneke's film "LA PIANISTE" is the ultimate degree in the personification of derangement, perversion and darkness, I've got news for you: the piano teacher in Elfriede Jellinek's novel "LA PIANISTE" (on which the film was based) is twice as "repulsive", "disgusting", "deranged" and even more fascinating -- though there can't be words enough to translate the level of artistic proficiency that Isabelle Huppert has reached here, above all other mortal actresses in activity today.
And who else could have played this character with such emotional power, complete with the best piano playing/dubbing an actor could deliver?In the novel as in the film, there are two big antagonists to the "heroine" Kohut: her own mother (wonderful, wreck-voiced Annie Girardot, in a part originally intended for Jeanne Moreau) and Austria itself.
The mother personifies Jellinek's perception of her native Austria as a country that deceptively and perversely encourages racist/fascist (or at least authoritarian) behavior, sexual and emotional repression, and, let's say, übermensch ideals which are impossible to keep today without the danger of a mental breakdown."La Pianiste" also deals with a very powerful and delicate issue: how dangerous it is to reveal your innermost fantasies to the one (you think) you love.
Here, Kohut learns (?) the lesson in the most painful and humiliating of ways.It must be mentioned that Elfriede Jellinek is one of the best-known and praised authors in Austria and Europe (well, now she's got a Nobel Prize!) and that autobiographical passages can be inferred in her novel, as she herself was a pianist and had a reportedly difficult relationship with her mother.
Haneke chose to hide this information in the film, forcing us to wonder how she got to be that way (don't we all know a Erika Kohut out there?).
All of them unmistakably human.I thought "La Pianiste" was a deeply moving film, very disturbing and thought-provoking, with a handful of unforgettable scenes, and that's just all I ask of movies.
(Anyone else I've talked to who's seen it has responded in much the same way.)The reason the film is so powerful is not simply because it deals with unpalatable subject-matter like sado-masochism and violently dysfunctional relationships - that on its own would leave no defence against a charge of exploitation.
It packs a punch because whatever her deeply ingrained character flaws, however reprehensible her behaviour (and at one point that's VERY), the piano teacher Erika always retains your sympathy - you never forget the type of influences which might have made her what she is, while scenes as subtle as the one where she walks down a street of shoppers, being casually bumped into without apology, remind you of her utter isolation.
Isabelle Huppert's performance is as brilliant as it is uncomfortable and I can't even imagine how she might have wound down after a day's filming.Appalling, compelling, horribly funny at times, but ultimately deeply despairing look at how people damage each other.
Michael Haneke (as a film-maker) and brilliant Isabelle Huppert (as the music professor Erika Kohut) place sexual relationships within a larger frame of reference -- that of the boundaries of one's own SELF.Erika is a highly intelligent, perfectionistic, ambitious and driven woman, who has single-mindedly and relentlessly identified her whole self with her work and achievement.
This shows even in the horrendous scene when Erika asks her potential lover Walter to beat her up.Equally interesting and intriguing are the two other main characters in the movie, Walter and Erika's pesky and nosy mother.
Powerful and thought provoking, 'The Piano Teacher' features a superb performance from Isabelle Huppert.
It's a very good movie, powerful, thought provoking and features a superb performance from Isabelle Huppert.
In the first twenty minutes we are swept away by several powerfully portrayed emotions: a suffocating and overbearing mother has a violent argument with her live-in 40yr old daughter; a piano teacher (and professor of music)'s love for her pupils expressed in unswerving critical appraisal; the joy that music can inspire both in the listener and the performer.
She is admirable in some external way for her self-control which reads, to an outsider, as cold precision, the kind needed to be an extraordinary classical pianist.But the movie takes us inside her life, first to the unhealthy relationship with her mother, then the oddly stern and indifferent role she takes with her advanced students.
(This woman, Erika, is played by the incomparable Isabelle Huppert.) He is a pianist of unusual talent, but he wants not to concertize, but to live life.
In Vienna, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a sick single forty years old piano teacher of the music conservatory.
Later works of her are more an indictment of the suffocation of life in Austria, a common element in Austrian post-war culture as the country has never come to grips with its troubling past.In the movie less emphasis is paid to the relationship with the mother and so the source of Erika's behavior remains largely unexplained here.
There are some good moments: There is no music when the end credits run, the use of Schubert (although used better in Barry Lyndon) as indication of 'decay', Erika never performing for a large audience herself, the mother has no name.On her personal website, Elfriede Jelinek has commented about the movie making process.
It seems that these people feel obliged to love an Austrian movie so that they can show off in their entourage because they are the only ones actually knowing where Austria is.I have just seen a opera in Paris directed by Haneke.
I don't think there's a socially respectable person in the world who would say that Michael Haneke's "The Piano Teacher" is a good time.
You need help." And yet all she does in cause pain and displeasure to others, and to herself, and we are left to watch and see just how far she can really go."The Piano Teacher" is not a good movie-going experience and I would probably be happy never seeing it again.
The film is about a piano teacher (don't confuse this film with THE PIANO However!), who doesn't want any of her students to surpass her, who gets involved with a brilliant new student in a perverse sexual relationship, and who is dominated by her "insane" mother (who, in the end, doesn't seem so insane anymore, after all that we saw before).
As a German actress she would have surely had better affinity with Michael Haneke who is an Austrian author.Even the role given to the veteran actress of the past Annie Girardot looks unconvincing as she never fits in such kind of troubled mother mold.The biggest error is related to Benoit Magimel's character.
Not for everyone, "The Piano Teacher" will play best with those into foreign films and character-driven dramas dealing with dark issues.
Watching  director  Michael  Haneke's  French - language  film  LA PIANISTE  [ THE  PIANO  TEACHER ]  brings to mind  another work  it   shares  an affinity with ,  Stanley  Kubrick's  chilling meditation  on violence ,  A CLOCKWORK  ORANGE.
Haneke's screenplay   for  why  these  two  are  so  pathetically  dependent on  each  other ,  but  as  depicted  it  is  obviously  a  situation  that has  lasted ,  and  festered , for  years.With  the  emergence  of  a  handsome ,  charmingly  arrogant young  man  in  one  of  Erika's  Master  Classes ,  the  movie takes  a  dramatic  turn  that  brings  both  teacher  and  student  to a  realization  that  neither  one  expects .
Erika's  night -time  forays  to  sex shops  and  drive - in  theaters  are  not  the  stuff of  mainstream entertainment ;  but  as  a  character  study of  one  gifted but unfulfilled  individual ,  this  movie  is  unflinching  in  its  honesty and  depiction  of  human  behavior..
It's also about the only one I'd seen before on Film 4 and this time round, it's the first Haneke that I really got into, savoured - and even enjoyed!Haneke only makes films that not only cause ripples, they're more like tidal waves and waver between being irritatingly provoking and genius and often those boundaries oscillate between very narrow margins.For once, Haneke focuses on just one person, an incredibly honest, pained and often humiliating performance from Isabelle Huppert, who is the teacher in question.
Featuring also pornography (as a playing video) and some otherwise very adult orientated material, this could all easily get too much, however unsettling much of it is, I would dare say that any open- minded adult, from pretty well any background would find much in The Piano Teacher - the content is justified by the story and the character.The ending, too, is surprisingly 'satisfying' (you'll see what I mean) for a Haneke, he is usually so open-ended that one often feels a little cheated.I would say that this is Michael Haneke's best film, so far.
His film Funny Games (1997) is among the most disturbing and unique studies on violence in media and as entertainment like Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1979) was and is, and it is not a surprise that both these films have been misunderstood by many during the years and that's why people not willing to think in cinema should never watch these films and this kind of difficult cinema and then judge them without valid arguments.
Haneke's film La Pianiste (Piano Teacher, 2001) is a study about feelings and thus sexuality, which have suffered during the protagonist's (Isabelle Huppert, the piano teacher) life time not least because of her almost dominating mother who doesn't let her daughter live her own life free and without guarding.
She has no feelings, as she says herself to one of the characters, Walter (Benoit Magimel), a young piano student she meets and who begins to like Erika very much, but sadly even his thoughts may not be too righteous.
It is often depicted in films that most horrific diseases of mind are because of traumatic childhood and Erika's childhood has ended when thought about her age, but her mother still thinks she is her little child and treats her like one.
Then she had had the possibility to finally save her damaged feelings and mind and live her life with healthy mind and normal relationship with her mother.Erika watches also porn and practices very perverse acts of "masturbation" and satisfaction, which she cannot reach by same methods that most people do.
Human mind has a drive for sex and sexual images, and hard core porn industry just feeds the needs of those who cannot get real sex from some reason, and by showing these images (never gratuitous no matter how graphic) Haneke just makes us look to mirror especially when we start to be attracted of the beautiful naked female on the cover etc.
La Pianiste tells also something about sexes and that how males are sadly to often in more powerful positions than females and it all is underlined in the scene in which Walter says something about how females cannot play with males' sexual satisfaction/needs as it's not possible, and even though the point may not be too clear written in here, you'll understand what I mean by this phrase when you see the film, which involves plenty of "female not satisfying male." As I told earlier, I think the last hope for Erika was Walter, but since even he couldn't offer her peace of mind and soul, her self destruction and giving up was the only way.
But since the emotions of hers are so damaged during the years, even this "non-carnal" love of hers can't save her.The last scene is extremely disturbing and involves the same ultra powerful cinematic element as Hong Kong film maker Billy Tang's endurance test Run and Kill (1993) which has the same power element by Simon Yam as La Pianiste has by Huppert.
I cannot find any mistakes or flaws in this again very brilliant film by Haneke, but I think the credits at the beginning are little irritating and not in sync with the piano music played at the background.
I only think we can think about you (after reading you comment), is that you're provably a non-sexual person (like Erika in the movie), and you are not ready for the new cinema that is coming up.
Isabelle Huppert is extraordinary in her performance as the piano teacher Erika Kohut.A very different, niche-type of emotional cinema that Michael Haneke excels in, this is one of his best along with Amour, Cache, Funny Games and White Ribbon..
However this narrow attitude of viewing sex as a means to defy her mother instead of a way to make love made her build a wall around her making her distant and immune to the possibility of developing any feelings for someone.'The Piano Teacher' for me revolves around the concept of control.
The dynamic between Erika and Walter in its progression and in the way the control shifts from one character to another, feels natural and considering the climax of the film, very believable due to the inherent risks that were always going to appear from Erika's point of view.Haneke doesn't engage in too much flashy camera like he did in 'Code Unknown' with the numerous long shots.
But the complexity of the characters and Haneke's uninhibited and piercing treatment of sexuality, control and power make this film worth a strong recommendation..
He plays well against Isabelle and switches between love, lust, wonder, shock, affection, repulsion, intrigue, indifference and blind admiration.Michael Haneke makes interesting situations and great film moments.
Things take a turn when she meets Walter, a young engineering student, whose hobby is music, at a recital and he becomes increasingly interested with her and her musical ability, and things really take a turn when he learns of her strange life outside of music.The two leads, Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel, are terrific as two people with nearly opposing interests in one another - one wants love, the other someone to help act out strange and even repulsive fantasies - yet the way they are shown coming closer and closer to each other is nearly mesmerizing.
Though the story focuses as much on Erika herself as her relationship to Walter with Isabelle Huppert giving a double edged performance showing two vastly different sides to a person.
"La Pianiste" aka "Piano Teacher" is very strong psychological terror tale about destructed mind,feelings and the reasons behind that."La Pianiste" doesn't explore violence like "Funny Games" did,but these are very important films and tell about real life and real people.The film is very disturbing psychological study of female who has very severely damaged mind and extremely sick sexual life and habits.Occasionally almost unbearably powerful and extremely harrowing;the final scene made me cringe.Isabelle Huppert is jaw-droppingly excellent as the main character-her performance is only comparable to Suh Yung's performance in "Seom"/"The Isle"(2000).Highly recommended-Michael Haneke is a genius!.
Michael Haneke's film The Piano Teacher is a classic example of the proverb "Be careful what you wish for" Erika Kohut is a teacher at a conservatory of music who is a closeted masochist.
But nevertheless, The Piano Teacher is clearly a well-made film with a clear vision from Michael Haneke.
This film tells the story of a female piano teacher who has perverse fantasies towards her young student.The piano teacher seems like an ordinary woman, until her dark side is introduced.
Michael Haneke has a knack for creating odd or even disturbing scenes or characters out of the most mundane situations and this is on full display in The Piano Teacher.
Anchored by Issabelle Huppert, a very competent support cast who hold their own and wonderful classical music (Schubert's iconic piano number from Barry Lyndon makes a return among other melodious pieces) this film explores the dark recesses of Erika's mind, her struggle with loneliness and her unconventional desires.
Erika's sexual desires are perhaps the weirdest I have ever seen in film, she's into BDSM, humiliation, voyeurism and even self mutilation, she's definitely a very perverse character which is brought up later on as well.
Neverthelles, this is an interesting film and to make things short I want to conclude by saying that it isn't perhaps a 'fun' movie to watch, but it is good cinema with some very good acting in it.
What happens to creativity when the denial of the emotional is detrimental to the aspirations of the intellectual?You become a piano teacher.Isabelle Huppert gives a frighteningly convincing and ultimately tragic performance as Erika.
The Piano Teacher of the title is Erika (Isabelle Huppert), a middle aged woman of pent up frustration who still lives with her mother, even sleeping in adjoining beds rather than in her own room.
The film turns around and you can't exactly know what the main player (an excellent Isabelle Huppert)is thinking of doing next.
She had so many emotional conflicts that I was exhausted by them long before the end.I have to admire Isabelle Huppert for taking on this difficult role - can you imagine what it was like to film some of those scenes?
It better be art, because it *sure* isn't entertainment.Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a 40ish music professor who teaches people to play the piano.
Perhaps this disconnection of the audio and the video is because Erika's work (music) and her personal life are so disconnected.I don't want to give too much away, but if you've seen or read anything at all about this film, you know that there is a relationship with a much younger male student.
My very humanity has been enlarged.That is the case with Isabelle Huppert's performance as "The Piano Teacher".
This review contains no spoilers.The Piano Teacher is, in many ways, a difficult film to watch.
An oppressive mother, marvellously acted by Annie Girardot, and her "pianist" daughter, giantly performed by Isabelle Huppert are the elements of this theatrical film which shows the decline of the femininity of a young "mind sick" lady who has a double life.