The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) covers repression, depression, confession, obsession and like that.
This is a psychological study of the personal sacrifice made for art that may well have great appeal, though we doubt it, to anyone who has made the art/life trade-off or at least had a ringside seat for same.
The Piano Teacher stars Isabelle Huppert as a 40-ish professor at the Conservatory in Vienna. She still lives with her domineering mother (Annie Giradot) and comports herself with steely frigidity, at least in those times when she's not cruising the porn shops.
She appears to be repressed to within an inch of her life.
When not carrying the entire future of Viennese musical excellence on her slim shoulders or giving a tongue-lashing to a recalcitrant student, our heroine is out watching tongue gymnastics of another sort at peep shows, where she happily sniffs previous voyeurs' spent kleenex. And let's not forget the fun to be found in personal mutilation or semi-public urination. Oh, the busy life of a single woman.
Then she falls for a willing keyboard genius (Benoit Magimel) and is prompted to reveal to him some of her degrading sexual interests. He is taken aback. What an affront! Later, he is taken aside for a sexual encounter at an ice rink and it is all very Wayne Gretzky meets Anais Nin. What follows is abuse, assault and more self-mutilation and then: fin.
The Piano Teacher is based on a novel by the ever grim Elfriede Jelinek, who, like the heroine of the film, had a father who died in the bughouse and a ferocious mom who hoped her daughter would be a concert pianist. Jelinek, who appears to be a major Freud groupie, talks about, "The renunciation by hundreds of female piano teachers of their libido," in her criticism of Austrian society; we'll have to take her word on that.
Meanwhile, The Piano Player, which is in French with English subtitles, has already won a handful of awards at Cannes (2001), and no doubt in the Self-Conscious Psychoanalytical Material category. What a waste of a perfect cast.
(This film is rated R)
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