"The Piano Teacher"
Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a piano teacher who refuses to allow any of her students to surpass her artistic skill. She also has perverse sexual appetites and tries to indoctrinate a brilliant new student to help explore her desires. And, she lives with her domineering, possibly insane mother, which may be why Erika, herself, seems pretty crazy in director/writer Michael Haneke's "The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste)."
This is one strange movie. Usually, I try to keep an open mind on a film and wait until it ends to decide how I feel about it. Not so with "The Piano Teacher." Not long into the film I began to feel a soiled sordidness about the events taking place on the screen. Erika is an emotionless, automaton of a woman (with an evil streak) who trains her students well, that is, until they show more promise than she. Erika will do her best to sabotage their talents, even to the point of harm. So, we establish the teacher as a sick and selfish person. Then, we meet mom.
At first, Erika's interaction with her mother (Annie Girardot) points to the matriarch as the root of the younger woman's obsession, But, as thing unfold, it becomes clear that mom may not be so bad after all and Erika is marching to her own perverse drummer. When she meets the very talented and much younger Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), she seduces him with sudden, carnal sex. From the very start of their torrid, confusing affair Erika gives the young pianist mixed signals. She wants sex under her terms and gives Walter a list of her sick-minded desires. He is repulsed. From here we see a spiral as Kohut waffles between demanding dominatrix and weak submissive. The highs and lows of her persona had me so confused I couldn't figure out what the heck is going on.
I would be tempted to call this a character study and dismiss the choppy, uneven story (by Haneke from the novel by Elfriede Jelinek) as quirky. But, the emotionless nature of Erika, as played by Huppert, kept me at arm's length and I never cared a naught for the woman. I actually feel bad for Walter as he is torn by Erika's on-again-off-again lust. She threatens, cajoles, begs and dismisses the young man so frequently and disjointedly that he couldn't figure which end is up, either. By the finale, I had my doubts about mom's supposed craziness, too, as the elder Kohut eventually comes across as the one who has suffered all these years at the hands of her not-so-sane daughter.
This would be a tough film to take if it had been pared down to a reasonable 90, or so, minutes. As it is, "The Piano Teacher" runs for two plus hours and they are grueling. Sickens abounds with Erika mutilating herself, attacking a budding student and performing sordid acts with Walter. The sex, though not graphically shown, is always sterile, passionless and sometimes violent. The ending of the film threw me for a loop and left me scratching my head as to what the heck I had just seen.
Maybe a more creative mind than mine could have made sense out of "The Piano Teacher," but that doesn't make me like the film any better. I give it a C-
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