untitled
THE
PIANO TEACHER
(La Pianiste)
Written & Directed
by: Michael Haneke
Internet
Movie
Database Entry for full details
GRADE: B+
2001.
Just
in case you’re worried that a movie called “Piano
Teacher” might be as stuffy and dull as your typical piano
lesson, Haneke quickly proves otherwise; within five minutes Erika
(Isabelle Huppert—wow), la pianiste of the title, is
shouting, name-calling and pulling her elderly mother's hair. Perhaps
that's not much more arresting than repeating major scales, but two or
three reels later she is sitting in a private screening room, watching
a pornographic film and inhaling the aromas of the booth's previous
occupants' used-tissues. How's that? The Piano Teacher, far
from priggish, is one of the nastiest, most prurient movies ever
committed to digital video outside of the San Fernando Valley, so much
so that its distributors felt it necessary to remove almost fifteen
minutes from the U.S. DVD.
But one ought to be prepared for such ordure from contemporary French-language films, especially those directed by Michael "Funny Games" Haneke. The Piano Teacher
is a character piece, a veritable gift to Huppert who gives everything
she's got into her performance as a prim and proper pianist with a
deviant desire for penis. A student calls her out, averring, "you're
not as indifferent as you pretend"; she may put on the airs of a mean,
tough professoress, but secretly, it is slowly revealed, she likes to
buy nice dresses that she can’t afford, put on make-up, and spy
on the kids at the drive-in as they're awkwardly humping in their
backseats.
Huppert was nearly fifty years old at the time of filming and so,
presumably, is her character (give or take), but Erika’s mother
(Annie Girardot), whom she lives with, treats her like a teenager,
constantly calling her when she’s out—"where are you? What
are you doing?"—and fighting with her when she gets back
in—“where’ve you been? What were you doing?”
(Lady, you don’t wanna know.) So it’s no wonder, then, that
Erika falls for a younger man, Walter (Benoît Magimel), one of
her students—if you could call her stirring salacity and
malformed sexual desire “falling”—and their
relationship smacks of adolescence and gaga monomania. Never before,
even in Death and the Maiden, has Franz Schubert, Erika and
Walter’s favorite composer, inspired such morbid emotions; it
seems for a while that Schubert will bring them together or Schubert,
specifically Walter’s poor playing of him, will tear them apart.
But far more is going on here than just piano playing and, later,
awkward bathroom handjobs; evidenced by a mad letter she writes to
Walter, what Erika calls “love” is probably, more
appropriately, sexual aberration, lust repressed for so long it's
become deformed, not to mention contagious as Walter, first repulsed,
is soon relishing in her preternatural kinks. (Magimel would be in
similar situation a few years later in Claude Chabrol's The Bridesmaid, another film with a Gallic digital aesthetic in which Magimel falls for a batshit broad.)
I don't mean to sound haughty or moralistic about other people's sexual predilections, but The Piano Teacher
explicitly exhibits the unerotic side of sexual fantasy; it's the
(arguably) subconscious desires behind the appeal of pornography put
into action as cinematic sex and the objectification of women are
shown, by the film's end, not only to be anti-titillating, but actually
rather sickening and sort of scary. In such a way, The Piano Teacher becomes to sex what Funny Games
is to violence, at least to a certain extent as the former is far less
smarmy and overbearing—and far more Huppert's show than
Haneke's—than the latter. Haneke loves to confound expectations,
and what began as arousing quickly turns repulsive as, for example,
Erika vomits rather graphically from performing oral sex; he seems to
be taunting the audience: “you want sex? I’ll give you
sex.” Readership, be careful what you ask for from this man
Haneke.
--
Henry Stewart
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