User Reviews

Erika (Isabelle Huppert) is a fortyish piano teacher with deeply repressed sexual feelings. She lives with her mother (Annie Girardot), a controlling, oppressive woman, and deals with her erotic longings through voyeurism, visits to sex shops and self mutilation. She still sleeps with her mother. The film largely takes place at the conservatory where she teaches and at the apartment she shares with her mother.

Huppert in an excellent on-disc interview says Erika longs to be loved but is frightened of seduction. She treats her students coldly but is drawn to one who is vain and handsome, and played by Benoit Magimel. The rest is the story of her creating and accepting a masochistic relationship with the young man that spirals down into her own psycho-sexual collapse.

This movie won't be everyone's choice for an evening with the kids. It's a serious, disturbing film for adults that looks grimly at repressed feelings and emotional self destruction. For the grownups, it might put you off sado-masochism for a few days. It's a first-rate film.

Isabelle Huppert is one of my favorite actors. Like Depardieu, she has no apparent screen vanity; she'll do what it takes for the role. She also has the rare ability to express deep, unsettling feelings with an absolute economy of expression. She is incredible in this film.

I'm happy to have the movie, but to tell you the truth I'm not sure how many more times I'll watch it.

Natural and realistic in all categories: acting, story, the opinionless-tone... Realism is typical Haneke and he does it flawless. Even though the subject of sexual frustration, obsession and pain turning into pleasure is not your daily encountering, this movie played it of as normal as can be which makes this a stunning piece of art. Haneke has the power of letting every viewer walk away after the movie with all different kind of feelings and for me that's a very powerful trait in the world of movie-making. He gives us the task of being more alert or things will go unseen. The stabbing-scene came and ended in a blink of an eye and the expression of Hupert in that very moment left me stunned and breathless. A true masterpiece

First of all, those who are faint at heart should definitely avoid this film. Even those, like me, who are desensitized to most graphically violent and sexual acts in movies should beware. I'm not telling you to steer away from the film, but be aware that what you're about to see is some disturbing material. Definitely not a pleasing film to watch, but nothing is put on screen strictly for shock value. But I must admit, when I watched the film for a second time, I had to skip to the next chapter when the "razor blade scene" came up.

The main character is one of the most unsympathetic sympathetic characters I can think of, but we start to better realize the humanity of her character later in the film's second act. In one scene, she stuffs broken glass in one of her student's jacket pocket after being dissatisfied with her apparently unsatisfactory performance and getting nervous when in front of a live audience. The student goes into her pocket and cries out with pain as she stares at her blood-stained hand. Next to the razor blade scene, that disturbed me most. The student's mother is not much more sympathetic than she. When she gets word that her daughter won't be able to play, she talks about it like she also got also her hand injured, being one of those spoiled mothers who tries to torture her daughter into becoming an overachiever.

Though the film intrigued me and caught my interest for the most part, I felt more needed to be explained about Isabelle Huppert's character. When a woman is fascinated by sadomasochistic porno movies and engaging in that behavior herself, you want to understand the root of the problem. The movie establishes that she wants desperately to be loved. Then why the hateful attitude towards everyone? Why does she receive sexual pleasure from pain?

The acting is terrific and I liked the glossy, stylized lighting. Altogether, it's not a film I'd recommend if you're in the mood to be entertained, but as I said it's very intriguing. And I'm sure if I watched it a few more times, I'd be able to spot certain subtleties that'll shed more light on aspects of the film I didn't realize initially.

My score: 7 (out of 10)

I cannot remember the last time I was so affected by a film. I was not so much moved as emotionally shattered. When I left the theatre I had no sense of where I was or what it would take to get home. Now I can write about it, compare it, classify it, and put it out of my mind so I can move on to the next film, anything to distance myself from the experience.

This is not an easy film to watch and is difficult to recommend. The images are graphic and, at times, sickening, yet I found The Piano Teacher to be a film that touches the soul and can be overwhelmingly beautiful in its dark poetry.

The Piano Teacher continues the theme of alienation of Laurence Cantet's Time Out, but brings it to a new level of separation from feeling and sensitivity. It is a study of the sexual repression of a middle-aged piano teacher (Isabelle Huppert), turned into a perverse, self-hating, and destructive relationship with a student (Benoit Magimel). The brilliant and powerful performances of the actors led to best acting awards for both at last year's Cannes Film Festival.

The Piano Teacher is based on a 1983 novel by Elfriede Jelinek in which she drew on her relationship with a domineering mother, and on her own repressed sexuality. Though the film ostensibly takes place in Vienna, there is no real sense of location, only interiors that could be anywhere in the world. "This is Never-Never land where nothing ends and nothing begins", Jelinek says. Adding to the intensity, the TV is always on in the apartment as an unwanted and intrusive presence.

The Piano Teacher is filled with great music and it is a redeeming quality of the film to be able to listen to beautiful performances of Schubert and Schumann (no relation). Yet Haneke shows us people who are surrounded by great music and are numb to the emotional experience. The characters talk about the great composers with cold and intellectual certainty, yet entirely without passion.

In the much-discussed toilet scene, Haneke's camera brings you so close to the action that all you can do is squirm. Although the camera never goes below the waist, the game being played of sexual domination and submission is clearly visible in the facial expressions of the characters. Ultimately, there is no release for the tension created by a character who seems torn between madness and reason, who acts on strange impulses, seems completely estranged from humanity, but remains so deeply human that we can recognize a part of ourselves on the big screen.

The temptation is to say these people are not me. They are so sick. Yes, that's true, they are not you, but isn't there is a part of Erika that is becoming more and more recognizable every day? We are increasingly surrounded by people who find it difficult to express emotion, who seek satisfaction but are unable to provide it, who are desensitized to violence and any kind of human empathy, who commit murder "to see what it feels like".

Haneke's film seems to be challenging the audience's request for sex and violence in movies. From what I have read, he has made a habit of making movies that shock and repel audiences and has decided that filmmakers and audiences alike are responsible for the cycle of creating and consuming violence.

In a statement in 1996, Haneke said " My films are polemical statements against the American 'taking -by-surprise-before-one-can-think' cinema and its disempowerment of the spectator. It is an appeal for a cinema of insistent questioning in place of 'false-because-too-quick-answers', for clarifying distance in place of violating nearness. I want the spectator to think".

He has definitely made us think and it is not a comfortable experience.

The only director who really matters right now is Michael Haneke. The 60-ish Austrian is only just now becoming known to American audiences (despite having been making films for a decade), because in this age of false freedom and faux radicalization, he's the real thing: a genuine free thinker and radical.

This makes his work scarily demanding, but on top of that, it's also relentlessly un-sensational: while he works on only the most extreme ideas and projects, Haneke suppresses all superficial gratification. Heads don't blow off, guns never fire, and nothing ever explodes - even though there's a high degree of emotional violence, the release mechanisms of cinema are completely suppressed. Catharsis is to be excised, avoided, or parodied; Aristotle's polemics are treated as laughably passe; most of Haneke's work ends abruptly, intentionally doesn't resolve, or actually re-starts at square one. As a result, his movies have been called "torture mechanisms", although his method is completely understandable: in a world of movies designed entirely as mindless catharsis, Haneke is staking out its antithesis as the province of his art: he's focusing on what everyone else has been avoiding.

The results can be cruel but are always exhilarating. Even I can't quite recommend "Funny Games", in which he turns the revenge cheapie (think "Last House on the Left") on the audience itself, forcing the viewer to suffer along with his victims. With its suffocated family dog, obliterated little boy, and eventual meta-narrative, "Funny Games" is probably the most disturbing intellectual statement since "A Clockwork Orange".

But while at first I felt that Haneke was Kubrick's heir, I'm becoming more and more aware of his debts to Kieslowski. In structural terms, Kubrick worked musically, and tried to impregnate the image itself with a novelistic depth. Haneke, on the other hand, avoids impressing us with his technique; instead he designs submerged structures and paradigms which illuminate but never directly state their themes. There's never a memorable shot in Haneke, much less a clever camera angle, or "dazzling" sequence; he simply disdains all that; he doesn't "love light", or edit with "a sense of rhythm"; somehow he just knows how to grip you without them. In "Code Unknown" he actually parodies the tracking shot - sometimes the camera keeps going when the characters have stopped, sometimes vice versa. In fact the one masterfully "suspenseful" sequence in the movie turns out to be a film WITHIN the film - Haneke just throws it in there to show that yes, he knows exactly how to do that, too.

Which brings us to his latest, "The Piano Teacher", with Isabelle Huppert, the first of his films to achieve even an arthouse release in the U.S., and certainly the most interesting film so far this year. Part of this new visibility, of course, is due to Huppert's presence, and part of it is due to the subject matter: everybody thinks they "understand" movies about frigid, bitchy women who are sexually perverted, and everyone expects them to be dirtily exciting beneath a patina of intellectual respect. In other words, they're dependable arthouse fodder, since that crowd loves nothing more than looking down its nose at other people's sexual mores.

Of course, with Haneke, the arthouse is in for a surprise. Rather like those who were shocked that "Eyes Wide Shut" did not give them an erection, some critics have had to turn away from scenes in which the main character nonchalantly sniffs semen-crusted tissues in a porno booth, or cuts her labia with a razor to "simulate" menstruation. What's almost worse is that these events usually occur just out of our line of sight, turning us into failed voyeurs - the furtive sex all happens with the characters mostly clothed, although their note-perfect performances tell you exactly where they are in the course of each act. This is de rigeur for Haneke, but it sends some folks into a tizzy (Where's the sudden, split-second shot of the bloody wound to make me scream? They can sense Haneke is messing with them, but unlike with, say, Tarentino, they can't figure out why. There are no ironically-framed immature gratifications here; what's all this FOR? (They just can't figure out that they have to figure it out.)

To be fair, there's a lot to figure out. Most critics have grabbed onto the old "repression" handle to explain Huppert's character, Erika Kohut, a sadistic piano teacher at a top Viennese academy. Erika lives alone with her aging mother (Annie Girardot) in an abusive psychological "marriage" in which the two women even sleep in two beds pushed together. So the "repression" handle seems good as far as it goes, but it doesn't really go very far - Mother's comment that "we're a passionate family" after Erika hits her full in the face is the first hint that repression ain't what this is all about.

Erika's relationship with her mother may be the starting point for her emotional state, but she's hardly repressed: in fact, she's in full, chilly flower. She has her own theory of Schubert (her specialty) - something about being poised at the brink of madness, and the composer's desolate "Winterreise" is practically her theme, with its creepy lyrics about hounds pulling at their chains. Erika is fully conscious of her desires, and knows exactly what she wants - she just can't get it in the "normal" course of human events. So she's reduced to various forms of voyeurism. Perhaps the film's eeriest image is of her wandering among the cars at a drive-in movie (in Vienna?) like a lonely ghost; she's looking for a couple in coitus to watch and climax with (and eventually she finds one, with humiliating results).

Clearly, she equates romantic ecstasy with cruelty (which is not the same thing as repression) - and music itself, which operates in the film as a metaphor for love, has become a theater of sadism for her. She berates and humiliates her students, even mutilating the hands of one (this scene, in which Erika places broken glass in the girl's pockets, is one of the most chilling evocations of malice aforethought in all film).

Into this frozen maelstrom wanders Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), a young pianist who's handsome, talented, sweet, and conceited. Klemmer is intrigued, then obsessed by Erika's icy disdain for his charms - which we can tell have always gotten him exactly what he wanted. Using his frustration as leverage, Erika slowly ropes him into becoming her partner in her own version of "love". This involves, of course, sadomasochism and degradation - only it's to be performed per her instructions exactly (and they run to several pages, single-spaced), in a way which will take vengeance on (of course) her mother.

Klemmer declares Erika "sick" - he's used to the usual give-and-take of standard sex, and he certainly doesn't hate women. But as he appreciates that domination of Erika physically actually means submission to her WILL, he reacts in a way that is subtly horrifying. Here Haneke plays his hidden trump card, for in Klemmer's "forcing" of normal lovemaking on Erika, we perceive that he is actually committing rape. In a word, he "breaks" her, and we can tell that she'll never recover. Her last horrifying gesture (and Huppert is unforgettable) somehow combines rejection with a kind of animal-like defiance.

As usual, Haneke has sprung a kind of trap, and turned the tables on the audience. How are we to dismiss Erika, when her perversities - all mirror images of idealized love - have produced such a cruel reaction in her sunny love-god - and in us? We're left floating in a kind of moral netherworld, like the singer of "Winterreise", in which we appreciate that our erotic pleasures have always had their dark twin of erotic disgust. And how are to say that this dark twin can't produce the same kind of transcendence? We deny it with no authority, as we - with Klemmer - are provoked to actual domination of Erika, just as she wished, but this time in OUR control, not hers. We want to hurt her - but why?

"The Piano Teacher", of course, is therefore concerned with the most basic issues of humanism - but it's an inquiry, not a treatise (this is where Haneke differs from his character, although they certainly share something in common). Unlike what all the pop critics label "subversive", this movie is ACTUALLY subversive - it gets under your assumptions and stays there. And for this, of course, it will probably be limited to a short run on the East and West coasts. But watch for it on video.

Erika Kohut is a woman with deep sexual problems. At the start of the film, we see her arriving home late. When her older mother protests, Erika goes into a frenzy, attacking the older woman without pity. Erika, as it turns out, is a musical teacher of a certain renown in the conservatory where she teaches. When we next see her, she is the model of composure, but she shows a cruel side in the way she attacks a young male student because she feels he is wasting his time, and hers. The same goes for the insecure Anna, a talented girl who Erika hates, maybe because she sees in the young woman a promise that she is not willing to promote.

At the end of the day, we watch Erika as she goes into an amusement area and proceeds to one of the cabins where pornographic material is shown. Erika is transfixed as she watches the things that are being performed on the screen. On another occasion, Erika comes to a drive-in where a movie is in progress. Her attention goes toward a parked car in which, two lovers are performing a sex act. The camera lingers on Erika as she is lost in reverie watching what the two lovers are doing, until she is surprised by the young man inside the car. Erika flees horrified she's been discovered.

When a wealthy couple invites Erika to perform in a recital in their opulent home, she meets an eager young man, Walter, who is related to the hosts. Walter is immediately taken with Erika's playing; the young man is a talented pianist himself. His eagerness to compliment Erika is met with skepticism on her part. Walter decides to audition for Erika's master class, and is accepted.

Thus begins Walter pursuit of Erika, who is taken aback when she realizes what the young man's motives really are. In turn, Erika, begins to fantasize about Walter in ways that only her mind could, imagining what she would like him do when, and if, they get together. Walter gets turned off by the letter Erika has written to him, detailing sexual acts that are repugnant to the young man.

The film's ending, reminded us of the last sequence of Mr. Haneke's current "Cache". We are taken to a concert hall where Erika is going to perform. She is seen stalking the lobby looking for the arrival of Walter, who goes on into the hall without noticing her. Erika's expression to the camera reveals a lot more of her state of mind in that last minutes of the film. As she flees the lobby area after inflicting a wound on herself, the camera abandons her and concentrates on the building's facade that seems to stay on the screen for a long time.

"La Pianiste" is a personal triumph for Isabelle Huppert. This magnificent actress does one of her best appearances on the screen, guided by the sure hand of Michael Haneke, one of the most interesting directors working today. Ms. Huppert's works with economic gestures, yet, she projects so much of her soul as she burns the screen with her Erika.

The supporting cast does wonders under the director's guidance. Annie Girardot, always excellent, is perfect as Erika's mother. She seems to be the key of whatever went wrong with her daughter. There is a hint of incest that is played with subtleness in the context of the film. Benoit Magimel is perfectly cast as Walter. This young actor does a wonderful job in the film as the young man, so in love with a woman that is possessed by demons, that he'll never be able to chase away or get her to love him in a normal manner.

Michael Haneke films are always disturbing to watch, yet they offer so many rewards because he dares to go where other men don't. The magnificent music heard in the film are mainly by Schubert and Schumann, two composers that are Erika's own favorites. The movie is helped tremendously by Christian Berger's cinematography.

One night as Erika Kohut returns home, she is immediately confronted with a barrage of questions and accusations and insults by her mother. It turns physical as the pair exchange slaps, and then her mother tearfully relents and guilt trips her into a heartfelt embrace and make-up. We sense that this is a frequent cycle of events in this troubled household. And then slowly, as Haneke always does, the uptight, business-first piano teacher is revealed to be some sort of sexually repressed deviant that seeks solace and expression in BDSM and other sexual kinks.

One of the things that this film excels in is visually portraying that carnal lust from our two main characters. One is a middle-aged woman whom is suggested to never have had a normal relationship, while the other is an excited 17 year old boy. In an American film, the lovers would burst through the doors, struggling but somehow never actually removing any of their clothes, and then we would cut to a post-coital scene with the sheets appropriately covering their top halves. Here, they are entwined with such quiet desperation (see the pose on the poster) even as their characters are so at odds with each other. She forbids him from touching her and denies him orgasms, no doubt passing on such a strict manner of obedience from her mother. And he jogs on the spot vigorously and celebrates on his apparent sexual conquest to be, like a 17 year old would.

The tragedy then, is in the misunderstanding of the psychological damage that has been done to Erika and its consequences. Walter is uniquely positioned at an age of breaching adulthood and suffice to say that his smile and greeting near the end of the film is supposed to be a pleasant one, but becomes chilling because he has completely misinterpreted the situation. This is a deeply pessimistic film, and I think for once Haneke has missed his mark in attempting to forge this character of Erika. He is forced to rely on these subtly shocking scenes as he often does; the peeing while voyeuristically spying on a couple in a drive-in theatre, the self-mutilation, and the sudden pouncing and sexual longing for the mother that reeks of simplicity and misunderstanding. She is reduced to a delicate sadomasochistic stereotype that so easily wilts over so that we are compliant in being sympathetic with her.

It is a pity because Isabelle Huppert's performance deserves much praise. There is a cold, calculated manner in the way she carries herself that puts on such a strong exterior barrier in her persona that makes it so much more effective when we peer into her deeper fantasies. After she is caught in the drive-in, she doesn't scamper away like some red-handed thief, but briskly makes her way out of the area with her head held high like some sort of businesswoman with a busy schedule. The slight embarrassment on Huppert's face sells it. Later, when she catches one of her students looking at porn magazines in a shop (but really it is he catching her), there is that slight embarrassment again, but she acts haughtily and dismissively and quickly pretends to be occupied. She presents herself as the harsh, unsmiling, career-orientated woman while committing such a petty and hurtful act in the background.

Haneke shoots these characters in harsh light and washed out palettes even as they are surrounded by beautiful music. His edits link together the steely, unblinking gazes of teacher and student and vice versa, blocking out all other directions. In one instance, he frames Erika at a piano recital, completely surrounded by empty chairs and separated from the others of the group. A conversation with the weeping mother of the wounded child conveys a strong sense of irony when she questions who would be so evil to do such a thing. But this film is not about the lurking of evil below the surface. It is about misunderstanding, and how it gives birth to tragedy.

I had no prior knowledge of this film and it was something of a shock to the system.

The first half hour or so suggest it's going to be a cosy romantic drama – the repressed attractive piano teacher finally falling in love with the young idealistic student who lets her see there's more to life etc etc.

SPOILERS AHEAD

However from the point where we see Erika at the sex shop, it's a harrowing journey which strips away the layers from both Erika and Walter and leaves both characters' inner selves exposed.

It is a tribute to Isabelle Huppert's acting that we retain sympathy for her throughout despite her actions (her intentional disfigurement of her student could even be interpreted as an attempt to save her from the same fate as Erika). We wish and hope that Erika could be saved or cured by Walter, but it is no surprise at the end where Erika accepts that there is no hope or future for her.

Similarly when Walter reveals his ruthlessness and callousness, we couldn't altogether condemn him – rather we feel an inner sadness at the baseness of human beings and their capability to inflict suffering despite having what starts out as the best of motives.

Altogether a disturbing film and not for the faint-hearted with some nice directorial touches – particularly the way Erika and Walter seem to change their appearances throughout which keeps the audience's attention and interest.

Having watched La Vie de Jesus just a couple of nights ago and now this, perhaps time for something a little more light hearted!

At the end of my review of Cache, I wrote that I was intrigued with Haneke as a film maker. This is what led me to get the DVD for La Pianiste, which I just finished watching about a half hour ago.

It's all been expressed, here at IMDb and in many of the external reviews - the gruesomely twisted pathology that would 'create' an individual like Huppert's Erika, who is still trying, after years and years, to please her mother, at the expense of everyone and everything else in her life, beginning with her self. She's repressed everything that would free her from her self-imposed bondage, including, of course, her sexuality, which has literally imploded, to the point of madness, to where she can no longer even begin to comprehend what a genuine loving impulse would feel like.

This is a graphic portrait of a severe emotional cripple, one who never found the strength to get out of her childhood situation and become a functioning adult. I think this subject relates to all of us - we're all striving for autonomy, but there are needs, so many conflicting needs, most of which are not even on the conscious level. It also deals brilliantly with the contrast between what one fantasizes about, sexually, and the reality of those fantasies, as well as the consequences of choosing to share one's sexual fantasies with another human being. Huppert's character gets what she asks for in the course of the film, and it is hardly the emancipating experience she had imagined it to be.

Regarding the much-discussed scene in the bathroom: I really appreciated how this sequence had all the possible erotic charge (for the viewer, I mean) sucked out of it because of the prior scene, where she put the glass in the girl's pocket. By the time she's acting out her let's-see-if-this-guy-is-worthy scenario in the bathroom, we've already found out that she's dangerously disturbed and so it's not a turn on, her little domination session with our poor unsuspecting dupe.

I think another incredible achievement of this movie is how, about halfway through it, I completely forgot that it was not in English and that I was reading sub-titles. That has never happened before, in any foreign movie, and I've seen quite a few.

In this film, like Cache, the ending is not all wrapped up in a nice little tidy bow, but unlike Cache, we do at least get some sense of finality, despite the fact that we do not even know for sure whether Huppert's character is alive or dead. After experiencing La Pianiste, when it comes to Michael Haneke, I am, needless to say, more than a trifle intrigued.