Director: Michael Haneke
Writers: Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek
Photography: Christian Berger
Music: Franz Schubert
Editors: Nadine Muse, Monika Willi
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoit Magimel, Anna Sigalevitch, Susanne Lothar, Udo Samel
The Piano Teacher was something of a sensation at the time of its release. It won awards from Cannes and elsewhere, often highlighting the performances of Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, the sexualized, delusional piano teacher, and Benoit Magimel as Walter Klemmer, her talented student and lover (if that’s the right word). Erika is nearing middle age and lives a kind of bohemian life, a gifted pianist in her own right, who particularly loves Schubert and gives lessons to get by, but with an unusual way of life. She still lives with her mother, but she has a compulsive, adventurous private life, where fantasy and reality bleed into one another. We see her visiting some kind of discreet, semi-classy porn store, where she gets a private stall to watch a selection of videos. She finds a used tissue in the trash and holds it to her nose while she watches. Presumably some previous patron shot his load into it.
There’s more. We see her cutting herself in the bathroom, hanging out at a drive-in theater to peep people having sex in their cars—she squats down to masturbate, is caught, and must hurry away. She puts broken glass into the coat pocket of a student who suffers intense anxiety. Why is she doing these things? It’s possible they are in the original novel by Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, also called The Piano Teacher in translation—I don’t know it. But they also fit with various extremities by director and cowriter Michael Haneke, who seems prone to them, or certainly did in about this period, bracketed by the two virtually identical versions of his curious creep show Funny Games, one from 1997 and the second from 2007. Enter Walter Klemmer, an exceptional young pianist but an arrogant, immature young man, who represents much that Erika thinks she wants.
The Piano Teacher was something of a sensation at the time of its release. It won awards from Cannes and elsewhere, often highlighting the performances of Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, the sexualized, delusional piano teacher, and Benoit Magimel as Walter Klemmer, her talented student and lover (if that’s the right word). Erika is nearing middle age and lives a kind of bohemian life, a gifted pianist in her own right, who particularly loves Schubert and gives lessons to get by, but with an unusual way of life. She still lives with her mother, but she has a compulsive, adventurous private life, where fantasy and reality bleed into one another. We see her visiting some kind of discreet, semi-classy porn store, where she gets a private stall to watch a selection of videos. She finds a used tissue in the trash and holds it to her nose while she watches. Presumably some previous patron shot his load into it.
There’s more. We see her cutting herself in the bathroom, hanging out at a drive-in theater to peep people having sex in their cars—she squats down to masturbate, is caught, and must hurry away. She puts broken glass into the coat pocket of a student who suffers intense anxiety. Why is she doing these things? It’s possible they are in the original novel by Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, also called The Piano Teacher in translation—I don’t know it. But they also fit with various extremities by director and cowriter Michael Haneke, who seems prone to them, or certainly did in about this period, bracketed by the two virtually identical versions of his curious creep show Funny Games, one from 1997 and the second from 2007. Enter Walter Klemmer, an exceptional young pianist but an arrogant, immature young man, who represents much that Erika thinks she wants.
