I cannot remember the last time I was so affected by a film. I was not so much moved as emotionally shattered. When I left the theatre I had no sense of where I was or what it would take to get home. Now I can write about it, compare it, classify it, and put it out of my mind so I can move on to the next film, anything to distance myself from the experience.
This is not an easy film to watch and is difficult to recommend. The images are graphic and, at times, sickening, yet I found The Piano Teacher to be a film that touches the soul and can be overwhelmingly beautiful in its dark poetry.
The Piano Teacher continues the theme of alienation of Laurence Cantet's Time Out, but brings it to a new level of separation from feeling and sensitivity. It is a study of the sexual repression of a middle-aged piano teacher (Isabelle Huppert), turned into a perverse, self-hating, and destructive relationship with a student (Benoit Magimel). The brilliant and powerful performances of the actors led to best acting awards for both at last year's Cannes Film Festival.
The Piano Teacher is based on a 1983 novel by Elfriede Jelinek in which she drew on her relationship with a domineering mother, and on her own repressed sexuality. Though the film ostensibly takes place in Vienna, there is no real sense of location, only interiors that could be anywhere in the world. "This is Never-Never land where nothing ends and nothing begins", Jelinek says. Adding to the intensity, the TV is always on in the apartment as an unwanted and intrusive presence.
The Piano Teacher is filled with great music and it is a redeeming quality of the film to be able to listen to beautiful performances of Schubert and Schumann (no relation). Yet Haneke shows us people who are surrounded by great music and are numb to the emotional experience. The characters talk about the great composers with cold and intellectual certainty, yet entirely without passion.
In the much-discussed toilet scene, Haneke's camera brings you so close to the action that all you can do is squirm. Although the camera never goes below the waist, the game being played of sexual domination and submission is clearly visible in the facial expressions of the characters. Ultimately, there is no release for the tension created by a character who seems torn between madness and reason, who acts on strange impulses, seems completely estranged from humanity, but remains so deeply human that we can recognize a part of ourselves on the big screen.
The temptation is to say these people are not me. They are so sick. Yes, that's true, they are not you, but isn't there is a part of Erika that is becoming more and more recognizable every day? We are increasingly surrounded by people who find it difficult to express emotion, who seek satisfaction but are unable to provide it, who are desensitized to violence and any kind of human empathy, who commit murder "to see what it feels like".
Haneke's film seems to be challenging the audience's request for sex and violence in movies. From what I have read, he has made a habit of making movies that shock and repel audiences and has decided that filmmakers and audiences alike are responsible for the cycle of creating and consuming violence.
In a statement in 1996, Haneke said " My films are polemical statements against the American 'taking -by-surprise-before-one-can-think' cinema and its disempowerment of the spectator. It is an appeal for a cinema of insistent questioning in place of 'false-because-too-quick-answers', for clarifying distance in place of violating nearness. I want the spectator to think".
He has definitely made us think and it is not a comfortable experience.
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