Flak Magazine: Review of The Piano Teacher, 4-15-02

The Piano Teacher is one of those "erotic dramas" that torment high school boys and middle-aged bachelors. From a soft-core fiend's point of view, it sounds promising — a beautiful yet repressed piano instructor is pursued by a handsome young student; they play mind games until he chases her into the ladies' room, where she gives him a beej; he comes to her house and she breaks out her S&M toys. But, alas, the film is bound to disappoint the twitchy-handed. Because far from being the Skinemax fodder it, at times, seems eager to become, The Piano Teacher is wonderfully subtle piece of psychological portraiture, a soberingly dark, well-executed inspection of repression and its consequences.

That The Piano Teacher is set in Vienna (despite being in French) is no accident — Freud could have written the script himself (instead, it's based on Elfriede Jelinek's book by the same name). Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), the title character, has spent years beneath the heavy hand of her mother, and their domestic interaction — at once a bitter codependence and a tender friendship — is a study of psychological interplay that should be required film-school viewing for years to come. Erika, a respected piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, is cold and needlessly vindictive with her students. Life with her mother has left her angry and alone; she is given to visit porn galleries and indulge in painfully deliberate acts of masochism. There are some extremely uncomfortable scenes (note to the squeamish: When you reach the second bathroom scene, go get some popcorn), but then that's the point: for the audience to literally feel the pain of imposed loneliness and the ends to which people will go for some — any — sensation.

Enter Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel). A handsome teddy bear of an engineering student with a knack for Schubert, he meets Erika at a party and begins to pursue her relentlessly. He interrupts her lessons, and, despite her protestations, he even manages to become one of her students. Walter is more than most women could ask for — dashing, witty, kind — but Erika refuses his advances. It seems, at first, that she is too far gone, a spinster before her time. But she snaps when she sees Walter help out one of her female students, and after she cruelly sabotages the student's opportunity to play in a jubilee concert, it's clear that she's not inured to Walter at all. It's all part of Erika's game, the stifling control she grew up with; it's the only way she can deal with other people.

Director Michael Haneke has made a name for himself by creating smart, dark films that ride on a turbulent mixture of sex and violence without ever falling into the exploitative traps that ensnare many American directors. His 1997 Funny Games has been hailed by many as the best Austrian film of the '90s, primarily because it's a bloody thriller that manages to deftly push the edges of taste while remaining an intelligent, biting take on the unsettled mind. Similarly, despite the sexual nature of The Piano Teacher, there is very little sex. What we do see is uncomfortable, the other face of desire; for all her B&D fantasies, Erika is an absolute novice, and as Walter begins to accept her vision of erotic play, she finds herself unable to control what she has created.

In an age that has thoroughly commoditized sexuality, when S&M is chic and hardly anything is shocking, Haneke's take on desire is refreshing, a reminder that the forces underlying our most basic passions are almost completely out of our control. Dr. Freud would be proud.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)