dreaming of what they don’t have
Michael Haneke (screenplay, based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek), Michael Haneke (director) La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) / 2001, USA 2002
When Michael Haneke’s powerful film The Piano Teacher first opened in 2002 in the US, numerous American critics described it as “depraved,” “unwatchable,” and “deeply disturbing,” even while saluting the director’s masterful approach and the wonderful acting of the film’s star, Isabelle Huppert (the film was awarded the top prizes for directing and its two major actors at Cannes). But even the mostly perceptive reviewer Roger Ebert could not quite put his finger on what was behind Huppert’s figure, Erika Kohut’s bizarre sexual behavior.
Looking back on this film nearly 11 years
to the date of its Los Angeles premiere—and having witnessed now four others of
Haneke’s brilliant films—this work seems far less shocking and ambiguous than as
it appeared to its first US audiences. One
might even describe this movie, filmed in Freud’s home city of Vienna, as a
textbook study of Freudian study of sexual frustration and perversion.
Having devoted her entire life to a
musical career as a piano concert performer, Erika has had little experience,
it is clear from the beginning of this work, with the opposite sex. She lives
with a domineering woman (Annie Girardot), not so very different from the kind
of stage mother portrayed in the American musical, Gypsy, a somewhat unrefined woman who, even though her daughter is
now in her 40s, continues to control her life and rule over her career and
teaching responsibilities. When her daughter does not arrive home on time, the
mother enters her closet to destroy any new dresses she may have purchased.
This tyrant even warns her insecure daughter not to let her students become
better interpreters of music than she is. The husband of this monstrous mother
has unsurprisingly gone mad. Erika painfully is forced to share her mother’s bed.
If her life is devoted to music,
particularly to the mournful love songs of Schubert and Schumann—one song
repeated throughout the film begins with dogs barking and people “dreaming of
what they don’t have,” typifying the “love, death, transformation” themes of
his famed leider, some of them written in the same year when Schubert began
experiencing the symptoms of syphilis—Erika clearly gets little joy from the
music she so elegantly performs. As a teacher at the Vienna Conservatory of
Music, she tyrannizes her students as her mother does her, demanding they
suffer in order to become great musicians. She is particularly mean to a rather
plain looking girl, Anna Schober (Anna Sigalevitch), whose entire has been
given over to piano-playing; her mother reveals to Erika that the girl
practices eight hours a day. Even her lessons are, as Erika expresses it, a
bore.
At a recital in which Erika plays in a wealthy Vienna apartment, the musician meets handsome if slightly haughty young man, Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel) the nephew of the apartment’s owner. During a buffet discussion he speaks somewhat intelligently about her performance, but she remains wary. He is evidently studying engineering at the university, but a piano performance by him after the buffet demonstrates that he has true musical talent as well, and despite Erika’s
Walter
Klemmer: Why destroy what could bring us together?
Erika Kohut: Mannerism is no...
Walter
Klemmer: [interrupting her] Why can't I look at you? Because if I do, I won't
resist the temptation to kiss you on the neck. May I kiss you on the neck?
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When Walter observes her escaping the
scene, he follows her to a bathroom where Erika has tried to hide herself away.
Leaping over the stall to bring her out, Walter forces her out, where she falls
into a passionate embrace with young man, but refusing to allow him to touch
her. She, in complete control, performs fellatio without allowing him to
ejaculate, demanding he keep his erect penis in place while facing her. While
he pleads with her, she terrorizes the student with threats that she will never
let him touch her again, before finally jacking him off, demanding
that
any further contact will be through her own methods, communications and
letters.
So begins a series of manipulative
actions in which she requests that Walter, in her own apartment with the
bedroom barricaded against her mother, tie her up, gag her, and force her into
sexual acts much like the ones she has witnessed on the porn tapes and the
magazines she has hidden under her bed. Reading her written requirements, the
young Walter is disgusted with her S & M demands. He proclaims he loves
her, but wants no involvement with such degradations, emphatically dismissing
her vision of sexual life:
Erika Kohut: Do you like me calling you darling?
Walter Klemmer: It's absolutely marvelous.
Erika: You must be patient. I'll give you all the games, we'll play all the games you
want.
Walter: You know you really stink? Sorry, you stink so much, no one
will ever come close to you. You'd be better leave town until you don't stink
so bad. Rinse your mouth more often, not just when my cock makes you puke.
When Erika continues to make her demands,
Walter leaves her, but utterly frustrated and mentally “snapping,” returns to
her home, locking the mother into her room while he beats and rapes Erika,
proving to her, obviously, that men are “pigs,” along with forcing to
comprehend that the fantasy world she seeks, played out in reality, like
everything else in her life, is without any pleasure.
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