Mind Games, Masochism, and Masturbation

Austrian auteur Michael Haneke's (Benny's Video, Code Unknown) The Piano Teacher, the second cinematic provocation of the season after Claire Denis's gruesome Trouble Every Day, succeeds more in punishing and unnerving its viewers than in seducing them. After being greeted with accolades (Grand Jury Prize; Best Actress; Best Actor) almost a year ago at its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, The Piano Teacher arrives on American screens led by a truly audacious lead performance by French actress Isabelle Huppert.

Considering the satirical quality of Heneke's previous films, The Piano Teacher is a pleasant surprise--though pleasant might not be the best word to describe it. With character now his emphasis, Haneke has taken Elfriede Jelinek's novel of the same title and crafted a bone-chilling psychological case study of a film. The film's protagonist, Erika Kohut (Huppert), is an emotionally-remote forty-something single woman who still lives with her domineering mother, played by veteran French actress Annie Girardot (Rocco and His Brothers).

Once a promising piano prodigy, Erika now teaches classical piano at an elite Vienna conservatory. Guided by her mother's maxim, "You can't let any of your students ever get better than you," Erika exerts a tyrannical control over young pupils' confidence and egos, berating them, not just for playing a wrong note, but for failing to grasp the underlying tonal structure of a piece by Schubert or Schumann.

But this sexually repressed martinet lives a secret life. In one scene, Haneke has Erika visit a drive-in movie to spy on teenagers making out in the backseat of their cars. Aroused by the sight of intercourse, Erika squats down and urinates before being discovered and having to flee. In another scene Erika indulges her porn obsession by visiting a peep show booth. While watching a particularly hardcore video, Erika sniffs a discarded tissue from the previous customer, while a piece from Schubert's Winterreise suddenly encroaches upon the soundtrack.

Haneke specializes in brutal commentaries such as this one, and the cult of classical music is not his only target in The Piano Teacher. Once Walter (Benoit Magimel), the young handsome student who attracts Erika's attentions, enters upon the scene, The Piano Teacher has potentially all of the trappings of a conventional domestic melodrama. Erika could be the oppressed heroine, her mother could be the tyranical parental figure who needs to be overthrown, and Walter could be the outsider who empowers Erika and liberates her from her miserable situation. But Haneke is not the type of filmmaker interested in satisfying a viewer's expectations.

Rather, The Piano Teacher is presented as an anti-melodrama. Its heroine is never presented as a victim, but instead as her own worst enemy. Both a sadist and a masochist, Erika takes Walter's advances, not as a romantic opportunity, but as an opportunity to more fully punish herself and inevitably both him and her mother. Unlike in most melodramas, Haneke offers no facile explanation for Erika's borderline behavior; the film conatins no speech or flashback that depicts sexual abuse as the roots of Erika's psychological conflict.

Haneke's anti-melodramatic tendency is fiercely on display in the film's most shocking moment, when Erika sits down on her pristine bathtub, pulls up her nightgown, and mutilates her vagina with a razor blade. It happens to be a scene that might have been truly climactic in any other film, but instead Haneke presents it here a matter-of-fact manner, in a single shot, with no music or cry of pain, and it appears only forty minutes into the movie. Haneke further downplays what would normally have been a "big" moment by having the mother character--almost comically--call from off-screen, "Erika, dinner's ready," immediately following the action itself.

Haneke's study in frustrated desire also becomes a perverse exercise in unreleased dramatic tension. In fact, the film's centerpiece scene could be a metaphor for the way the film itself works. Set in an empty conservatory bathroom, the scene features Erika, in her first burst of physical passion, on her knees performing oral sex on Walter. The event is expertly staged and symmetrically framed in a series of long-takes by cinematographer Christian Berger, who carefully avoides any exposure of flesh. But the event cannot be consummated. Erika brings Walter to the brink of orgasm, but then refuses to finish the job or to let Walter gratify himself, as a means of establishing control over him and delaying the completion of the act until later on, after he has been given instructions on how to punish her.

Haneke certainly has no problem maintaining a cool, modernist distance throughout the film, and it almost gets the best of him in the end. As if taking Erika's line, "I will not allow my emotions to overwhelm my mind," to heart, Haneke predictably holds back in the last shot, refusing any kind of release of tension. Still, this final gesture leaves little to complain about, if only because the greatness of the main actors' performances is never compromised.

Magimel, who resembles a young, French version of Sean Penn, succeeds in his role of undergoing the transformation from a confident, charming, stud infatuated with his older teacher, to an embittered rapist. Huppert, who has been in such films as Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate and Jean-Luc Godard's Passion, now has the role of her career as the virtually unsympathetic Erika. With her austere features and a subtly expressive face, as well as her total sense of commitment, Huppert is the perfect actress for this unflinching drama.