Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher is a film of both uncompromising cruelty and feverish beauty, harsh yet harmonious, but for a good portion, a compromise is agreed upon between the two. However, as the film progresses the former takes on dominant attendance and consequently masticates the latter’s efforts to build up a conclusion of the satisfyingly macabre. The course psychological study finds itself immersed in skewed perspectives of the psychosexual: Freudian sexual frustrations, abusive repression, and barbaric lust. These human flaws and desires puncture through the merciless, cold characters like the last thrusting visages of a fading libido. Though hardly diminishing are these characters in sexual prowess and capacity (or at least one), masking and designing facades with insensitive strictness parallel to a guise of slick cultural appreciation and precocity.
Doting on more than a handful of thematic strands dealing with deviant eroticism and masochistic fetishes, this can easily be a candidate for a most understood treatise on sexual repression, as well as “a film not for the faint.” At least to casual movie-goers, who may be given the “shock” of their culturally deprived lives, this will be deemed a most unwanted permit to the abyss of dislocation, by the art-less and censorship-happy class that so readily populate cineplexes. Not so much a visceral display with thought-provoking subtext (like Haneke’s 1997 masterpiece Funny Games, equally controversial) as it is an intellectual exploration with shades of visceral, voyeuristic entertainment; perhaps another misperception of this vicious curio. That the cast of dramatis personae are aptly chilling and difficult to understand will further repel the masses, second to its controversial haranguing of the conventional and the faint at heart.
A visual concentration of avant garde art-house and Kurickian sterile stability clothed in melancholic pallor, Haneke brilliantly marriages his trademark brand of self-awareness to sentient lighting and deep color, oft drenched in yellow fluorescence. In sort of an odd mix of Fincher, Kubrick, Greenaway, and even Wes Anderson, the film amasses to some amazing architecture and agreeable locales. With the opulent majesty of its French setting, and affluently classical backdrops (recital studios, music halls and such), the cold sense of dissociation, held deeply within our piano teacher, is heightened from mere annoyance by the world to bitterly acidic self-disgust and misanthropy. It isn’t so much about the exploitation of ruthlessness and acerbity of the characters sexuality but of repression and, therein-lies-the-character’s-quandaries, an attempt to break silence.
Shots of, predominantly, hands prancing over the ivories, and an appropriately minimal title sequence, open the film immediately after the film’s most-poignant starter scene in which a (title character) piano teacher, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert, also of another Elfriede Jelinek-penned film, Malina), enters her home and is severely berated by her overbearing mother (Annie Girardot.) Erika is a French piano maestro/professor at an upscale music academy, whose day to day activities are horribly mundane, adding to her already bitter and introverted attitude. She teaches students with an absurd strictness, often booming hypocritical, to perhaps hide her tart feelings of her own failed potential. She takes to stalking the malls and visiting the pornography booths for some unspoken pleasure, as well as retreating to her bathroom for slight self-mutilation.
When arriving at a recital engagement at an associate’s home, a handsome young hedonistic college student, Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel, current partner to French goddess Juliette Binoche) crosses her path and consistently presents her with conversation though she is clearly disinterested in his rather smug precocity and praising of classical piano. Though he is consummately gifted with the piano, Erika believes he isn’t serious enough, only in the theatrics of presentation as a hobby, especially when he wants to join her class of private lessons, which he becomes a part of, despite her protests. Soon his desires no longer contain themselves and he proclaims his love for her, or more appropriately his unusual lust, though she is less than ecstatic over the proclamation, or rather, bewildered. They begin a peculiar affair, of mostly awkward sexual tension; until she reveals a secret wish of being completed dominated by the forces of masochism.
Though the relationship never quite reaches a masochistic level, their parallel idiosyncrasies soon lead to an inevitable downfall. There are, perhaps, three associations that are the film’s keys to which arrays of morbid explorations develop: the Erika-Mother relationship, the Erika-Walter relationship, and the Erika-Erika relationship. In this voluminously ghastly trinity of embittered melancholia, a marvelous painting of the deconstruction of a pyrrhonistic, trampled spirit is produced. A delicate being of the tragedy of conventionally dysfunctional relationship medium (with her mother, and a mentioned father dying in an asylum) our piano teacher is the classic embodiment of tortured souls in involuntary nihilism. The teacher quickly perceives “kinky” and near-repulsive trysts with Walter as escape from the repression and horror so hyperbolically dealt to her, though when her propositional intentions turn things sour, it’s realized that she’s been hidden away from the “cruelties” of the world for a reason.
A stoned-face but (in oxymoron fashion) melodiously discordant, operatic gamut, surprisingly devoid of actual music soundtrack additions/editing, The Piano Teacher suggests the psychology and brilliance of a pianist as an exterior manifestation of her exhaustedly-bridled deviations from morality and norms. Perhaps a bit exaggeratingly distorted in its dark characters, though they’re fleshed by the actor’s magnificent sense of detached realism, and abruptly (but quite appropriately) concluded with an abandonment of the manacles of life altogether, Haneke is praiseworthy for taking a discomforting gaze at the breaking of social mores. Correspondingly in tune to the same exposition of the hypocritical conditions of unlikely social marauders of his Funny Games, sexual excesses rather than murders this time, The Piano Teacher is a good bet to depress almost anyone, but that’s the beauty of it.