Haneke's clinical adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel boasts two outstanding performances from Isabelle Huppert, as the repressed Viennese Conservatory professor, and Benoit Magimel as the student whom she demands beat her up. This is serious cinema, asking intelligent questions of modern culture and making similarly bruising demands upon its audience.
The most compulsive screen coupling of the year, conducted in conflicting "tu"s and "vous"s, is an icy romance which never quite thaws out. Scarcely less compelling is... more >
The most compulsive screen coupling of the year, conducted in conflicting "tu"s and "vous"s, is an icy romance which never quite thaws out. Scarcely less compelling is the relationship between Huppert and Girardot (in the role which suggests the question of who taught the teacher) as a bird-like mother who tends the nest and keeps pecking away at her only child. The final third of the film consists almost exclusively of two-handed scenes where characters work out the rules and boundaries of their game in locked or off-limits rooms in which it becomes distressingly clear that somebody somewhere is going to get badly hurt before the auditorium doors are opened once more.
It’s possible, too, that the film’s audience will exit reeling, bruised and beaten, with the sense they’ve been in the ring with a couple of heavyweights: The Piano Teacher’s actors and director are trained professionals working at the top of their craft, pulling no punches in their efforts to affect all whom they come up against.
Huppert, giving a female portrayal of psychosis to rival Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, is more remarkable for what she doesn’t do than for what she does: her arms perpetually folded across a chest cloaked in the dowdiest of schoolmarm uniform, with her hair scrunched back and a box of bondage equipment hidden under her bed, she doesn’t crack a smile the entire movie and only gets to wear make-up once the bizarre sex games have begun. The piano teacher is a woman who has not only cut herself off from the rest of the world (her studio in the conservatory has the upholstered walls of a padded cell, no less), but is prepared to go one step further and cut herself to suppress any desire which might re-connect her.
Magimel is no less impressive: here, a handsome actor has to give a performance in which the character knows he is handsome, only to find that his handsomeness is both no use and no defence against a woman who is almost impenetrable, who had her heart-strings severed long ago. The tension between the two - palpable in every scene - seems to derive from the fact the professor gives her romantic lead nothing to play with; the student is therefore filled with the frustration of the musician who cannot play his instrument, or of one who plays to absolutely no response whatsoever.
Haneke gets a lot out of the piano as a metaphor for performance. Where Hollywood stars in musical roles are often allowed to hide hands behind songbooks, there is no respite for Huppert or Magimel here - the actors really have to be performers, shown playing complex pieces which equate to their characterisations. Seeing an actor’s face, hands and the keyboard in the same shot here has the same effect as, say, seeing a major American star put their body double to one side and walk stark naked towards the camera with their head and other key parts still in shot; at any rate, it seems great bravery in the face of knowing that any wrong notes you strike will be seen by the eyes of the world, and I mean it as the highest praise when I say there are no false notes struck here.
