The Piano Teacher

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Maximo F This was one of the most unpleasant and booring things i have watched in my entire life Rated 0.5/5 Stars •  Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 10/21/24 Full Review Mason M I always know what I'm getting into when I watch a Michael Haneke film, and it's never very pleasant. The Piano Teacher may be cold, but Haneke's main strength in this film is that he's not scared to show us anything. This is full of the Haneke long take, where he can always find stunning angles where he never has to cut in a scene. This is a beautifully disgusting study of control and repressed desire, that will leave me thinking for a while to come. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 09/29/24 Full Review julie b The characters, the uncomfortably long shots, and the shifting power dynamics, all make for an unflinchingly disturbing movie. It’s well acted and well made, but definitely perverse slash twisted. The end had my jaw on the floor wondering what happened and for what exact reason. Also, some really perfectly controlled shots. Also also, was freaked out to realize this was the guy from the taste of things!! What!!! There were definitely many moments when I was wondering why someone said I would love this and begged me to watch this, and what that says about me. “You speak of things as if they were yours. That’s rare” “I am a pianist, not a poet” Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 09/19/24 Full Review Isaiah Y Well made film by Haneke, but the real highlight was Isabelle Huppert's performance. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 04/14/24 Full Review Max W I couldn't believe the ending. This one left me quite flabbergasted Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/28/24 Full Review Rhoyce N The Piano Teacher Instructs in More Than Mere Music From the outset, Michael Haneke's 2001 psychological drama, The Piano Teacher, entraps the viewer in the tightly wound, claustrophobic internal world of Erika Kohut, a middle-aged classical piano instructor who sleeps in the same bed as her toxically overinvolved mother. By day she is a slave to the rigidly structured institution of classical music training, and by night she is tyrannised by the domineering histrionics of her emotionally manipulative mother. As the screw is wound ever more tightly on the psyche of Erika, played to perilous perfection by French actress Isabelle Huppert, her repressed erotic impulses take a decidedly dark turn, leaking out as voyeurism, self-harm, and a predilection for erotic urination. When Erika is seduced by her much younger piano student, Walter Klemmer, played by a young Benoît Magimel in all his cleft-chinned, chiselled glory, her suppressed urges erupt into unabated sadomasochistic manoeuvrings that are at once bleakly menacing and saddeningly pitiful. Both actors won the Cannes Grand Prix for their performances. Magimel's Walter is as disturbing in his impatient, wanton physicality as Huppert is in her glacially ominous stillness. If Magimel is the wildcat ready to pounce, she is the cold-blooded crocodile calculatedly eying its prey. As their erotic dance descends into perversion, Erika's mind unravels, and a series of deeply disquieting, hard-to-watch moments reveal just how unhinged she is beneath those still waters. As the saying goes, 'It's the quiet ones you have to watch'. Adapted by Haneke from Elfriede Jelinek's novel of the same name, the film is as rigidly structured and tautly directed as Erika's confined world. Windows, doors, bars and elevators hem the title character into her stiflingly claustrophobic matriarchal enclave whilst sharp, cold monumental architecture dwarfs her in her patriarchal, institutional preserve. Yet, oddly, Erika's perverse sexual rebellion finds ways to refute them both. She engages in intimate self-mutilation to spite her mother's insidious sexual repression and commits unseemly licentious acts in the hallowed halls of the Vienna Conservatory as an act of desecration. As the story seesaws the tightrope between unbearably buttoned-down inhibition and a veritable convulsion of miscreant behaviour, the director skilfully transports us from distant viewer to empathic voyeur. When she is suffocating in her minuscule, tightly wound world, we are gasping for air, and when she is debasing herself on tile floors we, like shameful peeping toms, want to look away, but cannot. Frame-within-a-frame compositions entrap us in Erika's world while painfully long takes on Huppert's face, a portrait of conflict, have us palpitating with every indiscernible quiver. As Haneke expertly peels away the layers of Erika's repression, at no point does he shy away from her transgressive and taboo expressions of sexual liberation. Rather, he takes us along with every unrelentingly cruel and carnally depraved moment, daring us to cast the first stone of judgment. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 11/16/23 Full Review Read all reviews

The Piano Teacher

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