Michael Haneke skillfully adapts fellow Austrian, and Nobel Prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 autobiographical novel into a deeply insightful film about the lasting results of physical and emotional trauma as explored through Isabelle Huppert’s Erika Kohut character.
Erika only ever has trouble in mind. Familial exploitation has been a constant presence in her life. Her father died in a mental institution.
Elfriede Jelinek’s transgressive narrative is set in Austria where an ongoing abusive relationship between Erika and her live-in mother (Annie Girardot) plays out in brutal fashion.
Mother and daughter sleep in the same adjacent beds where the now absent father once slept, even though Erika has a room of her own.
The mother destroys colorful clothing that Erika purchases but rarely if ever wears. The women engage in knock-down-drag-out fights that end in hugs and apologies.
Nothing functional, normal, or peaceful can exist in their fraught relationship.
Her mother says, “That’s just how we are. We’re a hot-blooded family.”
Erika teaches classical piano in private lessons at the Viennese conservatory where she lords her thorough classical musical knowledge over her young students with cold hostility. Erika sternly follows her mother’s command that she never allow any of her students to surpass her talent.
Equal parts sadist and masochist, Erika is a perv on the prowl. Her mastery of classical piano goes hand in hand with her extreme desire for sexual perversity.
One very telling scene, in which Erika instructs Walter at the piano, involves her pointing out all of the different musical notations that give breath, nuance, and complexity to the Classical piece at hand. With verbal cues Erika precisely guides Walter’s fingertips via his intellect to exert the exact amount of pressure that she so deeply desires.
This is magnificent filmmaking on full display.
Erika goes to peep shows where she smells, if not licks, cum-soaked tissues left behind by past male visitors. Erika frequents drive-in movies where she stalks young lovers having sex in cars that she squats beside to urinate while masturbating. Self-annihilation is her ultimate goal. Humiliation is a ritual.
Romantic love as a social construct doesn’t exist, pain and humiliation must attend any sensual encounter.
Erika is also a cutter.
Enter Walter (Benoît Magimel), a clean-cut college engineering student with an innate talent for classical piano. Walter is drawn to Erika like a moth to flame. Little does Walter realize that he has set foot in a spider’s web.
Handsome, polite, intelligent, and articulate, Walter boxes outside his weight class with Erika by a good 20 years. Walter’s simplistic idea of love is leagues away from Erika’s desired sexual set pieces.
This is the romance Erika has been waiting for. However much Erika is able to handle Walter’s immediate sexual needs, he cannot return the favor when it comes to Erika’s perverse proclivities, however dirty, desperate, or exhibitionist they may be in practice.
“The Piano Teacher” is a stunning work of transgressive filmic art for its rigorous attention to the complex psychologies of its characters. Ego and id, desire and need, rules and anarchy, stupidity and intelligence, creation and destruction, all explode at once in a flash of willfully exposed degradation.
Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel deliver performances of a lifetime.
I know of no other movie that begins to capture the depth of emotional truths that Hanake’s adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel, affords the viewer.
Michael Hanake is the anti-Quentin Tarantino. Both filmmakers author their movies. “The Piano Teacher” is the only time that Haneke didn’t write his own script.
Michael Hanake views violence in movies as pornography. Rather, Hanake utilizes obscenity as a dramatic and satirical tool equally valuable to John Cassavetes’s soul-bearing approach to characters and situations.
The sex that occurs in this film exerts an undeniable erotic power. Hanake allows human eroticism to exist in scenes that play out in real time. Their semi-public places add inherent suspense. Your guts get involved.
A modern-day Pasolini, Michael Haneke rigorously attends to the molecules of narrative that enable vibrant drama to freely breed under his magnificent actors’ attentive care.
Although he is retired, Michael Haneke’s films remain a beacon of hope in Cinema. Here is a true filmic poet with wisdom and insights that become crystal clear through his provocative and controversial films.
“The Piano Teacher” is one of Michael Haneke’s greatest achievements. It is one of the few movies that dares to delve beneath the surface of BDSM psychology.
Rated R. 131 mins.
