La pianista

Definitely NOT for the faint-of-heart or for those seeking passive entertainment, this film is a masterpiece of portraiture of a highly talented and disturbed artist – a perfect illustration of the idea that genius is considered but a short step from insanity.

It has been many months since I viewed this film, and I find myself turning the film over in my head quite often. That – to me – is the mark of a well-done film – or any work of art, for that matter.

I have never since seen a prodigiously talented performer without wondering what their day-to-day life and relationships must be like. This film stayed with me despite my revulsion to its "ugliness" – the discomfiture it engenders.

Highly recommended!

To be honest I had to go have a stiff drink after this film; I felt drained and my shoulders were knotted. I also had to talk the whole thing out with the friend I saw it with for a good half hour. Whatever else this movie is, it's not dull - you have to have respect for anything that produces such a visceral reaction, even if you couldn't claim to have 'enjoyed' the experience. (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. View with caution.

The Piano Teacher (2001)

This is a difficult movie. It's difficult to watch at times, if you take it seriously. But I think it was difficult to film, to write, to act.

The premise is subtle even if it sounds sensational--show the inner mind and inner life of a brilliant woman who is mentally ill. She has compulsive issues, I think, and sexual repression that has led her to masochistic and finally sadistic extremes. 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. Finally there is a young man who sees only her ability, and her external beauty. (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. He plays hockey. He has friends. He smiles warmly. He is, in short, a healthy normal and rather handsome young man.

And he falls for Erika. This is where the movie gets weirder and weirder, but also more challenging. They play an intense game of sexual chicken, at first, and lots of head games. He knows she's superior to him in some way--older, more severe---but he has no idea about her slanted view of life and of sex. He wants her. He becomes a pupil of hers just for that reason. She pretends not to care, or to rebuff him (in part this isn't pretense because she's afraid). Finally a couple of serious and demented confrontations occur.

And things unravel in a very interesting way. Some people will find it simply sick and unwatchable. It also happens very slowly--if the film has an obvious flaw, it's the pace. It's in love with itself far too much. But if you get into that flow, and can take the pain that will rise up, then you will at least be greatly affected. That's more than most movies can say.

It's all quite in ernest. I don't think it's a bit campy or playing games with the viewer. It's really trying to get at this woman's psyche--and the young man's, since he gets in deeper than he intended. It's filmed with terrific planning and visual panache. And it makes some kind of deranged sense, too. In fact, there are probably more people in these kinds of situations than I'll even know, and to them I say give this a careful look.

Haneke's `Seventh Continent' is the most depressing movie I've seen in my whole life but after `La Pianiste' I would not want to miss anything this uncompromising Austrian director does. I'm not sure the movie would work without the great, haughty, fierce, indomitable, unforgettable Isabelle Huppert. Often Huppert has been cold and cruel and elegant and desirable, but never has she been so sick and twisted as here, and she goes the limit. There is no more fearless and confident actress in movie history and none I'd go so out of my way to watch.

I gritted my teeth and entered the theater expecting no fun. The opening credits won me over, though. The way the sound ends when the names come on, between each vignette, show an ability to make you take notice, to make the routine fresh. Each vignette is different; in each Erika Kohut, the piano teacher (Huppert) is cruel to another piano student in a different way. I could see something compulsively watchable coming. When the razor-in-the-bathroom scene came, I looked away: I'd been warned. Then I peeked: it wasn't so bad. Most of all, it was swift and methodical; she's as dispassionately cruel toward herself as she is toward others. It's a job to get done in time for dinner: mom's calling.

Besides Huppert, the young actor who plays Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel) is remarkable. Like his character, he appears ordinary, good but not great looking, too confident, boringly relaxed, but he surprises you by keeping up with Huppert every step of the way just as his character does. These two come together in ways I've not seen before on screen. The transgressive sex scenes are surprising from minute to minute and both characters are dynamic beyond all expectation. Both are conceived as contradictions. Erika is brilliant about music, insane about human relations. Walter is a normal guy, a hockey coach, a future engineer, but he plays piano recklessly and brilliantly and his musical thinking is mature. He is ready for the battleground that is Huppert's Erika and when they clash in horrible sexual warfare, both are changed. He pops back, but is drawn into her sadomasochistic games. She loses it and is going through a series of meltdowns, yet she remains visibly enough in control to be expected to play piano at a major recital when she has disabled her female student. Huppert is remarkable, but Magimel is completely authentic in all the most intense and ruthlessly intimate sex scenes: he knows exactly what he needs to do.

`La Pianiste' in other words is actor-driven, so when it won the Grand Prize at Cannes it was inevitable that Huppert and Magimel would get the Best Actress and Best Actor awards. It's hard to conceive the movie without them. The Grand Prize also signals recognition of Haneke as a major European filmmaker. Is it a desire to transcend his Austrian culture and become more pan-European that has led him to make his last two movies in French, and set `Code Unknown,' also a controversial film, in Paris? Why specifically does everyone in `La Pianiste,' which takes place mainly at the Vienna Conservatory, speak French? To accommodate Huppert? To modulate the cold Teutonic tone of the Austrian novel the movie's based on? Or perhaps – my theory – to make the whole story more abstract – because it's not just about sadomasochistic craziness but about cloying family ties, frustration, and abusive mentors, especially piano teachers? Rumor has it that piano teachers are sometimes as cruel as this. They just don't have Huppert's chutzpah, froideur, and elegant sexiness. In a way this is a fantasy about what a really, really mean piano teacher might be like in her spare time if our worst nightmares about her were true. This story is, certainly, about our worst nightmares, our repressions, the things we've imagined that we don't want to talk about, the sickness in our relationship with our mother and with our lovers. To deal with desperation and human limits is not to step away completely from everyday experience but to examine it under a microscope. Haneke takes us to places we have been before in our minds and in our emotions.

Walter (Magimel) is the voice of normality. He's a nice guy, a friendly, self confident, healthy, helpful athlete: he's a little like Wayne Gretsky. But though he laughs when he reads Erika's kinky, sick instructions for their sexual relations, then tells her she disgusts him and he will have no more to do with her, he's in love with her, so he winds up little by little starting to follow the instructions in spite of himself. Because of his admiration and love, he becomes another person. `La Pianiste' is about crossing the line, losing control in a world (like a conservatory of music) where control is the watchword. Walter laughs for us; he expresses our discomfort with Erika's insanity, and thus, as over-the-top as the movie becomes, we stay with it and disquietingly within it.

This is a transgressive analysis of emotion that's true to general human experience. I've been emotionally strung out with a lover (who hasn't?) and all this craziness spoke to my own emotional memories. `La Pianiste' has disgusting things in it, and I'm no masochist – not even as a moviegoer – but this is a terrific movie, perhaps a great one.

The Metaphysics of Self-Denial. This comment is bound to provoke some controversy by disagreeing with those who have easily classified this film as an indictment of sexual repression and self-denial. 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. In a sense, she is madly competitive and is painfully sensitive to any kind of attempt to "sideline" her or, even more importantly, to take her and her opinions for granted. She is no puppet in anyone's theatre. She is unpredictable and that's one of her major instruments of self-assertion. She is overly harsh on everybody surrounding her -- you need a pair of plyers to pull the most modest words of praise from her tight mouth. Observe Erika's body language in the film: accentuated pride, not an insignificant dose of aplomb and even snobbishness, cold sternness, and extremely caustic sense of humor.

But look more carefully: Erika is most harsh towards herself. Unimaginably and cruelly harsh on herself! Erika's fear of sex is not just a function of her mother's repression and other hackneyed reasons examined in thousands of other movies. Erika is first and foremost obsessed with what entering into any kind of a relationship, be it casual sexual intercourse or an enduring love affair, means to her sense of personal independence. She is prepared to forego relationships and suffer as a consequence, rather than to "succumb" and be forever unsure of whether she had given in or emerged on top. She experiences all human relationships, and sexual ones above all else, as a field of power play, of asymmetrical exchange of influences. And there is one thing she apparently cannot withstand at all -- and that's a thought, yes -- just a thought!, of yielding. Her world is truly stark and Gothic, it's a world of maximalist and dramatic choices -- yes or no, on top or on the bottom, bright or dark. She craves the most violent contrasts and cannot stand living in the zones of shades of grey. She understands only super- or subordination in the purest of forms.

Many would probably be correct to argue that Erika's obsession with remaining beyond anybody's influences is in many ways an outcome of her total mental slavery to her mother. And this is obviously a valid point. But the film's posing of the problem of sex in explicit power-related terms, in terms of a power game with fluid rules and irredeemably uncertain outcomes should be the primary focus of analysis. The Piano Teacher's finale is resounding in its relentless dramatism and even stoicism. Erika's conscious pursuit of emotional self-denial for the sake of what she deems her true (and avaricious) God -- self-sufficiency and professional greatness reveals that there is her war with her own humanity and her attempt to become godlike (as one poet said, 'eternal, cold and true'). Her God is completely indifferent to her sufferings and human flaws and needs -- He demands constant sacrifices, demonstrations of loyalty (not unlike Abraham's readiness to slay his own son Isaac at the Almighty's behest). In that sense, her character is not totally unlike the character of the obsessive and self-destructive chess player Alexander Luzhin from The Luzhin Defence or the driven John Nash from The Beautiful Mind (the parallels should not be extended). These movies both show the curative powers of love. There angelical women serve to relieve masculine anguish and self-destructiveness.

Here a man discharges this function.

Erika's sexuality is a function of all these considerations and complications. As a highly intelligent and sensitive woman, she is aware that any action in a relationship may be interpreted in radically divergent ways. Consequently, she alternates haltingly and hysterically between the sadistic and masochistic modes, obsessing over she is in "charge" of a relationship. 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. Walter's deep attraction to Erika reveals his inner demons -- his fantasy to serve as a redeemer, a liberator of sorts for a self-destructive woman. He desires to redeem the male part of humanity by welcoming Erika into the world of "normal" human sexuality, by curing her of her pains and doubts. The more he takes upon himself the mantle of a heroic redeemer, the more intense her battle of wills with him becomes, the more symbolic her conflicts with him grow. In a sense, Walter loses in the end! He deprives Erika of her virginity but she pretends to be dead and ice-cold during the act: the ultimate rejection and delegitimation!

Erika's mother is probably the true monster of the movie. Avaricious vampire of a human being. She buzzes with her annoying commentaries and bileful complaints over the viewer's ear like a mosquitto that she is. A spiteful, repulsive character.

This is a highly disturbing and extremely thought-provoking movie with absolutely no clear answers. Bravo, Michael Haneke and Isabelle Huppert for a brilliant movie and an equally brilliant and tense performance!