Change Your Image
dbainy-534-263253
Reviews
La pianiste (2001)
Love without compromise
Synopsis
The story is about Erica, a professional pianist/teacher at the esteemed Vienna Conservatory of music in the modern day. The severity she applies herself to her professional life is evident in the expectations of herself and that of her students. The contextual existence impacts her as a woman. Between caring for a domineering mother and her busy schedule as a professor of music and occasional recital pianist, she is without a lover or husband. Her sense of perfectionism is shaped by her discipline needed to be at the top of her professional life. However gifted and normal Erica appears during the day, at night she is perverse and bent in her views towards sexuality. She indulges herself frequently with peep shows, mutilates herself during masturbation, with voyeuristic and s&m sexual tendencies.
One day at a recital at a wealthy benefactor's home, she meets the talented young handsome pianist Walter. Walter, an engineer student, exudes confidence and talent while performing a piece of music that Erica loves and sought to perfect in her career that of Robert Schumann of the 19th century's Romantic period. Walter woos her with his natural charisma and his forwardness despite being her pupil and her icy resistance. Upon consummation, he discovers her sexual perversion. The couple hits a detour. She forces him to comply her ways without compromise. Despite Walter's disgust and hesitation, he eventually gives into her perversion because of his love for her. However, like a classic tragedy, Walter overcomes her powers and leaves her.
Analysis
As part of the special feature, Isabelle Huppert discusses the central themes of the film she tried to illustrate. She had envisioned a woman enraptured by her own ambitions and idealism of love. She wants a perfect lover. A lover that is completely under her power yet be strong and independent. Isabelle spoke of fragility of being a woman, that somehow she needs to exhibit almost masculine like facade to control and keep things orderly. The demands of her professional life and domestic life has repressed the character to the point she wasn't able to develop emotional skills needed to nurture a loving healthy relationship.
When the character Erica meets Walter, Huppert explained she wanted to portray a woman who did not want to be seduced. She felt seduction gives power to the man. A woman becomes weak when she is in love. Huppert wants to portray Erica wanting to maintain her power and absolute control. Erica follows her premeditation by not satisfying Walter at their first sexual encounter. Her behaviour towards him in their relationship is hateful, sadistic, cold and false. Yet in a way she wanted a warm gentle person to love her unconditionally that of a perfect lover who should please her in her perverse s&m sexual ways. Her inability to compromise led Walter to become increasingly frustrated and eventually fall out of love.
My Take
The film is a heavy weight. As it gets to the core of the matter why relationships fail.
For me this film uses Erica's extreme sexual perversion to illustrate and expedite how people are sometimes fixated on their own goals that blind sight them from more important aspects of keeping or fostering a relationship. What could have be an ideal pairing of two compassionate and like minded people, in the case of Walter and Erica, is broken by the pair's inability to reconcile their differences.
The fundamental cause of failure in any relationships is when one person places one's ego, freedom, and ideals without compromise over the relationship. It's the all or nothing attitude that breaks.
Zi hu die (2003)
Killing of an old love
The movie is set in 1930s China where the Japanese occupied China. It is a complex love story disguised as a spy thriller. I suspect the whole staging of the era and its circumstances is simply to illustrate an idea. "The idea that a new lover demands one to "kill" her old lover."
What more convenient way to illustrate this than actually killing someone. But the act is merely symbolic. If the movie was set in modern times without the apparatus of physical murder, then it would take a long long time to illustrate the killing/erasing of an old love.
In the movie, the main character played by Zhang Ziyi, realizes only after she has killed her old lover, she had made a grave mistake and she regrets. Only then, she realizes she loves him the most.
Another interesting idea it illustrated is that -the mind and body does mysterious things. The main character betrays her true love by a cause she does not really believe. She follows the orders of a man who she doesn't really love.
Strangers we are even to ourselves.