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The
Piano Teacher
review by Paula Nechak, 21 June 2002
28th Seattle International Film
Festival
Humiliation, control, madness,
power and perception scorch Michael Haneke's implosive The Piano
Teacher, which earned best actor and actress prizes for co-stars
Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel at the 2001 Cannes Film
Festival.
Rightly so, too. The film relies so
diligently upon Huppert's magnetic self-sufficiency and perfunctory
pragmatism to alternately draw us in and equally taunt us that it's
doubtful we have seen a portrait of disturbing coldness and clarity
spew such a mess of emotional disarray, disturbance, disconnection
and pain onscreen. Haneke, working from the novel La Pianiste
by Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, reaches deep into the
shaded, hidden bowels of Huppert's extraordinary talent and emerges
with an unforgettable film that literally and viscerally threatens.
In The Piano Teacher,
Huppert is Erika Kohut, a cool, autumnally dressed musical genius
who teaches at the prestigious Vienna Conservatory. By day she
pummels her students with clipped verbal assaults designed to tear
away confidence and destroy youthful dreams. "A wrong note in
Beethoven is better than a bad interpretation," she tells one young
man as she stands imperious and disapproving at a window. Erika
knows how to hit the most hurtful, fragile places in people,
perhaps, as we learn, because she herself has had the same cuts and
stabs inflicted upon her.
Despite her acclaim, talent and
age, Erika still resides with her widowed mother (Annie Girardot), a
nightmare of maternal obsessiveness, possessiveness and accusation.
The pair spar and slap, confront and terrorize each other, only to
fall into their womb of a bed where they slumber the end of each day
away.
By night, however, far from
mother's dark and furious clutches, Erika is something else. She
patrols tony porno houses, inhaling the flaking semen that soaks the
gentleman clientele's disposed kleenex, all while devouring a menu
of hard core fare. She creeps up on couples making love at the
drive-in, urinating her voyeuristic relief next to the rocking car.
And she mutilates her genitals with a razor kept as neatly wrapped
as her hair or her own surface emotions, only to be met with a
disapproving "that's not very appetizing" from her mother when a
rivulet of blood escapes and rolls down her thigh at the dinner
table.
Things turn for Erika when Walter
Klemmer (Magimel) appears at a recital in which she is performing.
He's a tall Aryan speciman, blond and windswept, and after a couple
of brisk, contentious interchanges, imagines he's in love with this
unattainable woman. At first this wholesome golden boy, obviously
aware of his charms and cleverness and quite used to the hunt of
seduction and conquest, hardly seems in Erika's league. But her
demands, designed to give her maximum control of a sexual liaison,
open a Pandora's Box of and Walter's own tricky demons, long
percolating, take their place in this roundelay of neurosis and
struggle.
Author Jelinek has said that
Erika's story "is the bloody consequence of the fact that a woman is
not allowed to live if she claims a right that is not hers and that
she obtains only in the rarest of cases: artistic fame. The right to
choose a man and to dictate how he tortures her - that is,
domination in submission - this she is not permitted." If she
initially begins as Walter's tormentor she ends as her own, and as
women have done throughout history - unlike their male counterparts
who have external outlets in which to vent self-loathing and agony -
turns her impotence inward.
Many have stated that they feel
little compassion for this monster of a woman but within her - and
so extraordinarily unfolded by Haneke and Huppert - is the result of
her own emotional abuse. Who is the victim here? It's hard to tell.
The shapes and roles shift and sway, victim and aggressor wear
different cloaks at every act. But Haneke gives us, in several
instances, Huppert's face in extreme close-up; she listens to her
beloved music and with slight, minutely visible flickers, tell us
tomes about her life, her repression, pain and immature sexual
fantasy, the frustration and unbridled rage at those who wait to
usurp her seat in the world of musical academia or in Walter's arms.
Her ability to wound those who threaten her is within her immediate,
childish reach makes her less monster than irretrievably damaged
goods, and Huppert revels in the ultimate act of Erika's inevitable
humiliation with skinned and raw honesty.
Haneke has accomplished what,
perhaps only the French director Claude Chabrol has done with
Huppert's sturdy, durable waifishness (though she's got an adept
sense of timing in, not surprisingly, dark comedy) because he also
mines the wit in her aloofness. She was a mysteriously humorous
presence in Hal Hartley's Amateur and added much to Bertrand
Tavernier's Coup de Torchon and while lately has
worked with Benoit Jacquot, she's made films with two of my favorite
directors, Francois Ozon and Olivier Assayas, who have an innate
feel for women characters. And though people rarely think of her
having a sense of humor it's indisputable that she has a great sense
of irony. When Huppert is stranded in the soap operatics of, say,
Diane Kurys' Love After Love, we hardly believe she'd give up
control for an everyday affair and at least, not in the
traditionally mundane and formulaic film female fashion. In her
self-containment she needs an outlet that fringes on the perverse
and Chabrol - in films like La Cérémonie,
Violette Nozière and Une Affaire des Femmes -
and now Haneke, who also mines much humor in his dark tale - have
given her the space to roam this elusive, complex, pathological
terrain. It's a performance that cannot be shied away from, nor
ignored, and in its truth it churns our stomachs with its ugliness
and beauty. Like love it both attracts and repulses.
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