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The Piano Teacher film review
THE PIANO TEACHER
Running time: 130 mins
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoit Magimel
When Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher was shown at the Cannes Film Festival this year it provoked a storm of controversy, with many of the assembled critics walking out before the film had finished. Nevertheless the film went on to win honours for its leading lady and its leading man and it now arrives on our shores untouched by the hands of those at the BBFC. So why all the fuss?
The answer is because this is a sledgehammer of a film which deals with taboo issues of secret sexual desire, mental breakdown, fetishes and behaviour which so-called 'normal' society frowns upon. Wisely, director Haneke refrains from challenging our attitudes on what is visually acceptable by eschewing nudity on the part of his actors (a trait which ruined already feeble but highly debated recent films such as Intimacy, Romance and Baise-Moi. Most of the horror of The Piano Teacher comes precisely because of the lack of explicit sex on screen: instead the director internalizes his characters' emotions, and apart from a brief glimpse of a pornographic video, those seeking titillation will be disappointed.
This is not to say that the film doesn't contain some of the year's most memorable and disturbing images. Isabelle Huppert, for over twenty years one of the great actors of modern French cinema, is La Pianiste, an extraordinarily stern and highly accomplished piano teacher who accepts nothing but the best from her pupils. A middle-aged spinster, living in a claustrophobic apartment with her overbearing mother (Annie Girardot), the initial part of the film suggests that her only escape from her humdrum life is her love for Schumann and Schubert.
However, we soon learn that behind this frosty façade lies a mind capable of somewhat strange sexual activity and enormous cruelty, but one which is evidently suffering some form of breakdown. We follow Erica (Huppert) on her sexual journeys: she collects discarded semen-filled tissues from hardcore video cabins, engages in some genital self-mutilation and spies on copulating couples at movie drive-ins..
Back at her symposium a handsome young student joins her class for individual lessons. Walter (Benoit Magimel) is everything Erica is not: young, handsome, witty and charming and in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, he soon confesses his love for his teacher. Unable to respond in any traditional way, Erica agrees to meet him but only on her own terms, setting off a chain of events which will ultimately end in catastrophe.
The intensity of the acting coupled with supremely controlled direction lifts The Piano Teacher into a world of its own. When Erica decides to ruin the career of one of her pupils by sticking glass in her pocket (thus inevitably maiming her hand) Hanake spends over a minute lingering on Huppert's back while she ponders her decision. Hands play the biggest part of any piece of the body in the film and Huppert manages to convey extraordinary emotions through her body language. It is not a film for the faint-hearted (and indeed the final three scenes are almost unbearable) or those who are squeamish at the sight of blood, but it is hugely provocative, often mysterious and certainly one which lingers in the mind long after the closing credits.
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