THE PIANO TEACHER (Michael Haneke, 2001)

Among the most disturbing films I have encountered, La pianiste (literally, The Female Pianist; called here The Piano Teacher to trick audiences into thinking it’s a film about musical pedagogy, not sex), makes the case for sexual repression. Perhaps to my imperfect understanding, the case is this: Let sleeping dogs lie, for the alternative is that all hell busts loose. Really, this was part of the case for the continuation of the Soviet Union, whose disintegration, among other things, let all sorts of suppressed ethnic and regional tensions explode. While I might wish that the Soviet Union had continued as a counterbalance to the United States’s fearsome unfettered power on the world stage (prophetic of its own inevitable collapse), I have a harder time adopting the case made by this solemn example of Euro-chic that one should keep one’s sexual feelings under raps. Not that I approve of a master class musical professor’s getting it on in a public bathroom with one of her students, even at his initiative. Simply, it seems to me that the choices this film gives Erika—a life of repression or a life unraveled—constitute what we used to call the tyranny of false alternatives. At least this artificial situation has struck one thrilling note of grace by providing Isabelle Huppert with the chance to give one of her best performances—possibly her greatest one. But to what thematic avail? And I thought her Madame Bovary had problems!

Indeed, Erika finds herself between (forgive) a rock and a hard place, for before she drops to her mid-forties knees in order to Lewinsky the twentysomething boy, her sexual life, such as it is, abounds in unpleasantness that seems to argue that its repressed nature mustn’t continue. Let me count a few of the horrors: watching porn flicks while sniffing discards of the booth’s former occupant’s semen; masturbating in the dark, crouched by a car, at a drive-in theater as the parked pair of kids fuck; applying a razor blade grazingly in the bathtub, perhaps in homage to Ingrid Thulin’s assault on her vagina with broken glass, in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972). But that’s just the half of it—the masochistic half of Erika’s sadomasochistic personality; for here we have someone who beats up Mama (70-year-old Annie Girardot, looking 80, but excellent—best supporting actress César), with whom she is living, with whom she sleeps in the same bed. (Later she will assault her mother with tearful bedtime kisses on the mouth, shouting, “I love you!”) Moreover, Erika is an absolute terror as a teacher, routinely driving students to tears with her exacting standards, vicious sarcasms, and humiliating assertions of authority. After catching a tutee sampling girlie magazines, she blames this “piggishness” of his for his alleged poor performance at their session, explaining afterwards that she will have to discuss the intimate matter with his mother, whom she instructs him to bring to their next tutorial. (Even Simon Cowell wouldn’t do that.) Finally, when Walter Klemmer, the boy she is destined to service, is sympathetically attentive at rehearsal to an unsteady, diarrheic pupil, Erika stuffs broken glass (Thulin again?) into the girl’s coat pocket, resulting in the latter’s torment over a bloodied hand. (Note the poetic justice; the girl’s piano-playing is done for a while.)

Klemmer, who himself is sharp, deciphers what has transpired and, realizing that his professor, jealous, loves him as much as he loves her, follows her into the college bathroom for their rendezvous with kismet. He gets a stretch limousine; she gets a mouthful. And all the while she retains her authority, instructing the boy to remain still and silent, and threatening not to bring him to orgasm. (In university parlance, a grade of Incomplete.) Sex with this woman, like taking a music lesson from her, is a truly difficult thing. Yet it’s the boy, running around in the hallway outside the bathroom in an effort to save face, who apologizes to Erika, assuring her that their next sexual encounter will be better. At their next musical session, Erika has her own (contradictory) assurance for Walter: She has no feelings for him, but what feelings she has for him will never get the better of her intelligence. This boy has an even harder job in front of him than he imagines, for, deflecting all his sexual overtures, Erika hands him handwritten pages instructing him on all the details to which their future sexual encounters, if any, must conform. (“. . . Hit me hard around the face many times. . . .”) “Love is built on banal things,” she tells him after apologizing for the poorly written note: “I’m a pianist, not a poet.” Erika’s vulnerability is now asserting itself: “Do I disgust you? . . . From now on, you give the orders.” Walter is (as are we) repulsed and leaves Erika in her room close to tears. The tables have begun to turn. Their relationship will be abusive, miserable, pathetic—and passionate. (Wagnerian.) After the next blow job she gives him, Erika vomits Walter’s load. Their next encounter, in her apartment, is conducted on the floor. Following his beating her up (per her written instructions), it’s (dare I say?) conventional sex—only she matches his tenderness with utter passivity, humiliating him by willfully turning the encounter into rape. At a school concert at which she is supposed to perform in place of the student whose hand she bloodied, Erika stabs herself in the shoulder with a kitchen knife and grimaces frightfully. (Perhaps if Walter hadn’t ignored her when he showed up, she would have stabbed him, not herself.) There the film ends.

In an interview included on the DVD, Huppert says that the film is about the difference between love and seduction. Erika, she says, wants to be loved but not seduced. She doesn’t want to lose control; she doesn’t want to be hurt.

I (alone, it seems) did not much like Haneke’s Code Inconnu (2000), so it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t care for this film of his either. (La pianiste is the worse of the two, for being so manipulative beneath such artistic poses as Erika’s pontifications regarding Schubert.) And yet there’s scarcely anyone to whom I wouldn’t recommend it for the opportunity to watch Huppert in a brilliant performance. Huppert was named best actress at Cannes, the European Film Awards, and Seattle. The critics in San Francisco also named her the year’s best actress.

Benoît Magimel, who plays Walter, was named best actor at Cannes as well, although I don’t see why. (Magimel was Juliette Binoche’s much younger life partner for a spell.)

Haneke himself won the jury’s Grand Prize at Cannes (this is the award just below the Palme d’Or); La pianiste was also named best foreign film at the German Film Awards. Working here in French, Haneke was German-born and raised in Austria.

AFRAID OF THE DARK (Mark Peploe, 1991)

A thriller of some small interest, Afraid of the Dark was written and directed by Mark Peploe, Claire’s brother, who, with Peter Wollen, wrote the original script for Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) and won an Oscar, along with Bernardo Bertolucci, for penning the latter’s Last Emperor (1987). It’s a trick film, I’m afraid, that presents as real the mental madnesses of a little boy who is going blind, hence the title. Everyone is in this film: James Fox, Fanny Ardant, Paul McGann, Robert Stephens, David Thewlis (a couple of years away from Naked and brief glory). The kid is genuinely scary, especially when he takes Mum’s knitting needle to the eye of an affectionate neighborhood dog. I regret to say that this doesn’t turn out to be one of the lad’s fantasies.

THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS (Valerio Zurlini, 1976)

I highly regard Valerio Zurlini’s work. Three of his films—Cronace familiare (1962), Le soldatesse (1965) and Seduto alla sua destra (what we in the States rechristened Black Jesus, 1968)—are included in my list of the 100 best films from Italy, Greece, Portugal & Spain. His last film, lavishly available on DVD, is something of a disappointment, however. Il deserto dei Tartari covers some of the same territory as does John Ford’s brilliant The Lost Patrol (1934). Zurlini’s film is intelligent, intellectually challenging and strikingly photographed, but often it seems more production than film, impersonal rather than personal, and it pales beside the Ford. It is somewhat latter-day Leanish—stately, selfconsciously composed, repressed.