The Piano TeacherWhen people are emotionally repressed, they fall prey to all manner of depravity. The Piano Teacher is a psychological drama about a woman named Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), who teaches piano at a conservatory. She is icy and stern with her students, practically bullying them for any perceived fault in their performance or character. At home, she is constantly criticized by her domineering mother (Annie Girardot), and the two frequently bicker. Secretly, Erika has an array of bizarre sexual fetishes, sharing them with no one. One day, she meets a young student named Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), and his attentions toward her threaten to shatter the spiny shell she has meticulously crafted around herself and her desires.
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The Piano Teacher was written and directed by Michael Haneke and is based on the novel of the same name by Elfriede Jelinek. As with much of Haneke's films, social mores are often shattered in surprising ways, blindsiding the audience as the veneer of morality and security is violently ripped away. Haneke teases this in the first scene, during the argument between Erika and her mother. She criticizes why Erika was out so long away from home after work. Without a satisfactory answer, the mother grabs Erika's purse and mocks her for concealing a fashionable dress in it, which gets torn as the two try to wrest it away from one another. The angry Erika pulls her mother's hair in retaliation, and later, the mother makes her feel guilty by claiming that she has a "gash" on her head from the fight. Even though Erika is perhaps in her forties and has a prestigious job, she lives in her mother's cramped apartment and even sleeps in the same bed. This suggests that her living situation isn't born out of financial insecurity but emotional. This is just the first hint at Erika's psychological damage; another comes when we learn that her father was institutionalized. Is this meant to imply that Erika crazy? Little by little, we discover that she is, yet she is surprisingly effective at concealing it behind her cold exterior. After all, few would question someone as having perverse urges when they dress and act in a puritanical way, expressionless with her hands in her Burberry trench coat. Erika is talented--at least as a pianist, if not as an instructor. She abuses her students in subtle ways, a kind of vicarious revenge against her mother, perhaps. At no point does she ever uplift her students; she only debases them. This is most painfully felt with an anxious student named Anna Schober (Anna Sigalevitch), who it is implied is a nervous wreck because of Erika's castigations. And when Erika becomes jealous after Walter shows kindness toward Anna during a rehearsal, Erika takes out her anger on Anna in a subtle yet excessively cruel way. No teacher who gives a whit about their student would ever do this, which makes this event speak volumes about just what kind of person Erika truly is. When Erika and Walter first meet at a recital, she is immediately cold toward the engineering student, despite his genuine talent for piano. Nevertheless, he initiates educated conversations with her about her favorite composer, Franz Schubert, and performs a selection for her benefit, trying to attract her. Anyone else might be flattered by the display; Erika instead chooses to harden her heart even more. When he petitions to become her student, she is the only one opposed among the other instructors to admitting him...and yet he becomes her pupil all the same. Erika struggles with the two sides of her personality, distressed by Walter's attention. On one hand, she has become accustomed to her reclusive (yet sexually morbid) lifestyle. On the other hand, the idea of exploring love with Walter appeals some part of her...a part of her that she has plunged deep into the darkness within her. Which side will win?
Haneke has been described as a provocateur, and with good reason. His films frequently deal with unsettling subject matter, and this is further accentuated by the unexaggerated and authentic characters and settings in his movies. This makes us feel like observers into a world that not only looks like our own, but is our own. So when violence and chaos emerges, it is all the more convincing and all the more alarming as a result. Erika is put upon by her mother and aloof; perhaps she lacks any true sexual experience. Subsequently, our perception of her changes when we see her casually stroll into a sex shop about a half an hour into The Piano Teacher. Suddenly, our expectations about Erika's sexuality is thrown up into the air. The men in the store look on at her with surprise, yet she never flinches away, maintaining her ramrod straight gait and emotionless visage all the while. No shame, no excitement. And when she is admitted into a private room, The Piano Teacher is alarmingly overt in its graphic depiction of pornography before cutting back to Erika indulging in her own peculiar fetish. The contrast from the Erika we thought we knew and this one is powerful and disarming--like getting hit by a truck, to put it into metaphor. And from here on out, our expectations about Erika and the story are always on shaky ground, creating a tension that permeates the rest of the film, never letting go. And each instance of Erika indulging in some sexual "eccentricity" continues to provoke the audience with questions like, "how much is too much?" or even "is this normal?" But for Erika, her sexual deviances appear to be rooted in abuse. When she and Walter "communicate" about her desires, he believes that she's kidding because her demands are so twisted and violent as to be unbelievable. Walter is forced to consider that despite his earlier proclamations of love for Erika, her "needs" may be too much for him to handle. And all throughout The Piano Teacher, because Erika has exploited her position to play mind games with her students, there is the lingering fear that this, too, is some elaborate and malicious way to "punish" Walter for having the temerity to approach her at all. Vulnerability threatens her, and so she retaliates when she feels threatened. Could all of this--her letter, her strange games, her demands to be abused--be a macabre way to ruin and destroy Walter? To exert dominance over him? To make him suffer? In this, Erika represents the worst thing that can happen to love: to have it turned into a weapon--a chain that lashes you to your vices and is wielded against others who truly care about you. That unsettling feeling that sticks in your craw as you watch The Piano Teacher comes because you are challenged to consider whether Erika is worthy of sympathy or not, of pity or not. Of love or not.
Recommended for: Fans of a challenging and disturbing exploration of power, sexuality, perversion, and authority concealed beneath the surface of everyday society. Made in 2001, it's easy to see now how The Piano Teacher must have inspired similar psychological power struggles in movies like Black Swan and, more recently, Tár, both of which also use classical music and the performing arts as a backdrop for their stories.
Haneke has been described as a provocateur, and with good reason. His films frequently deal with unsettling subject matter, and this is further accentuated by the unexaggerated and authentic characters and settings in his movies. This makes us feel like observers into a world that not only looks like our own, but is our own. So when violence and chaos emerges, it is all the more convincing and all the more alarming as a result. Erika is put upon by her mother and aloof; perhaps she lacks any true sexual experience. Subsequently, our perception of her changes when we see her casually stroll into a sex shop about a half an hour into The Piano Teacher. Suddenly, our expectations about Erika's sexuality is thrown up into the air. The men in the store look on at her with surprise, yet she never flinches away, maintaining her ramrod straight gait and emotionless visage all the while. No shame, no excitement. And when she is admitted into a private room, The Piano Teacher is alarmingly overt in its graphic depiction of pornography before cutting back to Erika indulging in her own peculiar fetish. The contrast from the Erika we thought we knew and this one is powerful and disarming--like getting hit by a truck, to put it into metaphor. And from here on out, our expectations about Erika and the story are always on shaky ground, creating a tension that permeates the rest of the film, never letting go. And each instance of Erika indulging in some sexual "eccentricity" continues to provoke the audience with questions like, "how much is too much?" or even "is this normal?" But for Erika, her sexual deviances appear to be rooted in abuse. When she and Walter "communicate" about her desires, he believes that she's kidding because her demands are so twisted and violent as to be unbelievable. Walter is forced to consider that despite his earlier proclamations of love for Erika, her "needs" may be too much for him to handle. And all throughout The Piano Teacher, because Erika has exploited her position to play mind games with her students, there is the lingering fear that this, too, is some elaborate and malicious way to "punish" Walter for having the temerity to approach her at all. Vulnerability threatens her, and so she retaliates when she feels threatened. Could all of this--her letter, her strange games, her demands to be abused--be a macabre way to ruin and destroy Walter? To exert dominance over him? To make him suffer? In this, Erika represents the worst thing that can happen to love: to have it turned into a weapon--a chain that lashes you to your vices and is wielded against others who truly care about you. That unsettling feeling that sticks in your craw as you watch The Piano Teacher comes because you are challenged to consider whether Erika is worthy of sympathy or not, of pity or not. Of love or not.
Recommended for: Fans of a challenging and disturbing exploration of power, sexuality, perversion, and authority concealed beneath the surface of everyday society. Made in 2001, it's easy to see now how The Piano Teacher must have inspired similar psychological power struggles in movies like Black Swan and, more recently, Tár, both of which also use classical music and the performing arts as a backdrop for their stories.