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THE PIANO TEACHER Send This Review to a Friend
The most daring of films that I saw at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival was Michael Haneke's "The Piano Teacher," now in commercial release and featuring a startling, risky star performance by Isabelle Huppert. She is absolutely superb in a role that many an actress would not have dared to play. Huppert portrays Erika, an austere, demanding and outwardly cold piano instructor who has a love-hate relationship with her mother (Annie Girardot). Walter (Benoit Maginel), a handsome student, falls for her but little does he know what he's in for. Erika is revealed to be a masochist given to self-mutilation and wild subservient fantasies. She also is capable of mutilating others.
Huppert gives one of the best performances of her illustrious career in this bold film that doesn't shrink from upsetting scenes and does not spare the sex involved. Both Girardot and Maginel are also strong. The problem is that many will find a few scenes tough to watch, but that is a credit to the film for being so unflinching. Erika is a walking menace. We get an inkling that she has a secret psychological life when she matter-of-factly enters a porn shop to the astonishment of the men around her. The visit to such an emporium by a woman immediately raises the temperature of the film.
When Erika finally becomes involved with her student after repeatedly rejecting his advances, her list of sexual demands further elevates the film's heat level as she reveals herself to him in ways for which he is totally unprepared. But that's just part of the explosiveness. It is her vicious actions toward a young woman student that defines the terrible anger and jealousy that she harbors within her twisted mind. Harrowing scenes are made more so by the evil intent that underlies them.
Haneke, who wrote his own screenplay based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek, holds nothing back in depicting Erika, and neither does Huppert, who gives a consistently stunning performance of award caliber. But "The Piano Teacher" certainly is not a film for every taste. The mere idea of self-mutilation will put off some viewers, but for those ready to open their minds the film has a haunting overall mood and explores aspects of sex that we don't generally see depicted, certainly not by a star of Huppert's stature. A Kino International release.
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