Daring Huppert

Isabelle Huppert is a major talent. And though I love the French actress in numerous films, one of my favorite Huppert performances is in a relatively newer picture--Michael Haneke’s "The Piano Teacher" released in 2001. In honor of the French beauty's recent birthday (May 16), I'm taking another look at one of the weirdest, sexually convoluted teachers, and really, women ever placed on film.

In Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, the taciturn piano teacher cites Schubert and Schumann as her two favorite composers. Both German, both “Romantics” both tortured in art and life—the composers are apt choices for this cinematic creature. Schubert, the bigger genius, outward bohemian and poet, was Schumann’s greatest admirer. Schumann cried over Schubert’s death at 31 and later went insane, dying in an asylum at 46. Schumann said he could not talk about Schubert unless he spoke “to the trees and the stars.”

Schubert worship runs through Haneke’s picture as teacher Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) instructs in Schubert’s dynamics from “scream to whisper, not loud to soft.” Such is her disposition, and, like Schumann, she, the outwardly ordered woman is inwardly screaming—one step away from the nuthouse herself, where as we learn in passing, her father is suffering through the rest of his life.

But that’s only one aspect to Haneke’s intensely complex study of a woman living on the precipice. As with all of Haneke’s philosophical “horror” pictures from Benny's Video to the brilliant, terrifying Funny Games to Code Unknown, there’s a consistent theme of claustrophobia, voyerism and perversion—perversion of not only the characters, but also of audiences wishing to lap it up and beg for more (master). But Haneke wants you to think why you’re salivating and, in his own cleverly cinematic way, punishes you for doing so (it's no wonder Haneke was--as he states on the DVD--profoundly influenced by Pier Pasolini’s Salò). He likes to rattle your brain and moral center, making you ruminate long and hard on what you’ve just witnessed. With The Piano Teacher, it might be when our fine character lies in a bathtub and...I'll get to that later. The Piano Teacher, as squirm inducing as it can become, may be the director's most powerfully unsettling, erotic and at times, comic film.

The movie has the 40-ish Erika still living with her unpleasant mother (Annie Giradot) in a relationship so antagonistic, unhealthy and, for lack of a better word, close that the two still share a bed (and you’ll see what that’s like through the course of the film). Erika is a distinguished professor at a prestigious Viennese school who’s worshipped but feared as she harshly criticizes students: “A wrong note in Beethoven is better than a bad interpretation.”

But she’s a loner with some pretty intriguing outlets for her sexuality. Trolling sex shops, sitting in the booths to smell the refuse left by horny patrons, she’s more than just a repressed female seeking release—she’s a sadist as well. And there’s something proud about her thrills that, amid the beautiful classical piano music works some convoluted ideas about the human condition. Gorgeous depravity or rather, is anything truly exalting unless you’ve witnessed the sullied? She's something you rarely see in cinmea--a female creep.

When a handsome young student, Walter (Benoit Magimel), becomes interested in her musically and sexually, he falls hard for the seemingly placid teacher. He changes a public performance of a Schoenberg piece to Schubert just for her (and that is quite a difference—modern discordance to Romanticism), and she begins to test his limits of sexuality, specifically in a masterful sequence in the conservatory’s bathroom where a bizarre, painful dance of erotic control commences.

If you’ve thought you’ve seen female desire on film, than you haven’t seen The Piano Teacher. This may be the only film one can think of where the protagonist is something of a lurker, a sadist/masochist (in one scene she places broken glass in a student’s coat pocket; in another she cuts her vagina in the bathtub) and yet, she is oddly sympathetic.

In one of film’s bravest performances, Huppert creates a character of such intrigue and bottomless depth that we can’t possibly crack her. Though something of a female pervert, she remains reserved—acting through pinched, near non-expressions that explode into manias. She’s frightening, and though a lover of Romantic music, anything but romanticized. Subversive, meditative and poetic, The Piano Teacher, thanks largely to Huppert, is a daring work of sexually strange, unmitigated genius.

Comments

[serial catowner]

I wanted to ask you to take this review to the next level- but I'm afraid we can't, as you say, she "creates a character of such intrigue and bottomless depth that we can't possibly crack her".

Making the effort I watched the movie several times, and part of what makes it scary is that it never puts a moral in a box and wraps it with a ribbon.

Not a movie for the faint-of-heart.