Quest Status: 722 / 1000
TSPDT Rank #699
I've always been meaning to get into the films of Michael Haneke, but...
No, I won't go there. Sure, I had only seen two Haneke films (The Castle and the original Funny Games) before this one. But let's put that aside. After watching The Servant, I saw The Piano Teacher in my watchlist and was irresistibly drawn to it, although I knew little about it. The little I sensed from the poster and a few scattered comments across the internet about control and sadomasochism were enough to intuit that it was the natural next step after the frustratingly vague but endlessly disturbing insinuations of The Servant.
And indeed, this is the next step. Rather than masters and servants, The Piano Teacher focuses on the power dynamics between teacher and student. In a world where most people no longer listen to classical music, the existence of those who perform it becomes cutthroat and unforgiving. Enterprising students practice can for eight hours a day while their parents prod them to go further - and for respected professors like Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), a cold and frightening virtuoso teacher, it can never be enough. But Professor Kohut has problems of her own. She lives with her mother in a tiny Vienna apartment, her every move thrown under abusive levels of scrutiny despite being in her late 40s. She seems to have little to no sexual experience, stealing away to sleazy porno shops to vicariously experience what is always out of reach to someone as inaccessible and devoid of feelings as she is, while performing acts of self-mutilation and dreaming up masochist fantasies to punish herself for her perceived sins.
Enter Walter Klemmer, an attractive young man with a predilection for Professor Kohut's favorite composer, Franz Schubert. He is instantly attracted to the older woman's outwardly controlling aura and senses the vulnerability and loneliness lying beneath her hard veneer. But little does he know how deep it lies. As Walter becomes Erika's student, Haneke probes into their volatile relationship with unflinching realism, even as the power dynamics begin to shift and the roles of teacher and student begin to come into question. Haneke's style of realism is uncomfortable to watch because it feels so plausible. Like The Servant, this film doesn't answer the difficult psychological questions that are posed to the viewer, although Haneke's calculated setup allows us to follow both character's movements with sickening clarity. At the film's conclusion, when the tension that has been building for two hours finally breaks, it's a moment that we can comprehend on a primal level even if we've never been in that particular situation before - just as a good serial killer film allows the viewer to vicariously inhabit a murderer's psyche.
