The Piano Teacher (Unrated Edition)
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Movie Reviews of The Piano Teacher (Unrated Edition)
Movie Review: So it's twisted...
Summary: 5 Stars
Beautiful music, excellent actors, funny (pesty mother scenes), gut-wrenching (hands in broken glass), sick main character, make for an artwork of a movie.Movie Review: Featuring a stunning performance by Isabelle Huppert
Summary: 5 Stars
If it is true that sadomasochism is a two-sided coin which contains the whole in the diverse expression of its opposites, then the cinematic portrait of Erika Kohut has its reality. Professor Kohut treats her piano students with a kind of fascist sadism while longing for the same for herself. Her outward expression projects her desire. That is why she can hurt without guilt or remorse.
Along comes talented, charming, handsome young Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel) who is attracted to her because of her passion and her intensity. He wants to become her student so as to be close to her. She rejects him out of hand, but because of his talent the Vienna conservatory votes him in. He falls in love with her. Again she pushes him away, but he will not take no for an answer, and thereby begins his own descent into depravity and loss of self-respect.
The question the viewer might ask at this point is, who is in control? The sadist or the masochist? Indeed who is the sadist and who the masochist? It is hard to tell. Is it the person who has just been greatly abused both psychologically and physically, who is actually lying wounded on the floor in grotesque triumphant and fulfillment, or is it the person who is rushing out the door, sated, giving the order that no one is to know what happened.
But Erika is not just a sadomasochistic freak. She is a sex extreme freak. She wants to experience the extremes of human sexuality while maintaining the facade of respectability. Actually that isn't even true. She says she doesn't care what others think. She doesn't care if they walk in and find her bleeding on the floor because she is in love. Love, she calls it. For her sex and love are one and the same.
At one point Walter tells her that love isn't everything. How ironic such a superfluity is to her. How gratuitous the comment.
The movie is beautifully cut and masterfully directed by Michael Haneke who spins the tale with expert camera work and carefully constructed sets in which the essence of the action is not just clear but exemplified (as in the bathroom when Walter propels himself high above the top of the stall to find Erika within). He also employs a fine positioning of the players so that they are always where they should be with well timed cuts from one angle to another. This is particularly important in the scene in which Erika, like a blood-drained corpse caught in stark white and black light, lies under her lover, rigid as stone. Here for the most part we only see her face and the stark outline of her neck with its pulsating artery. We don't need to see any more.
The part of Erika Kohut is perfect for Isabelle Huppert who is not afraid of extremes; indeed she excels in them. I have seen her in a number of movies and what she does better than almost anyone is become the character body and soul. Like the woman she plays in this movie she is unafraid of what others may think and cares little about her appearance in a decorative sense. What matters to her is the performance and the challenge. No part is too demanding. No character too depraved. It's as if Huppert wants to experience all of humanity, and wants us to watch her as she does. She is always fascinating and nearly flawless. She is not merely a leading light of the French cinema; she is one of the great actresses of our time who has put together an amazingly diverse body of work.
I think it is highly instructive and affords us a wonderful and striking contrast to compare her performance here with her performance in The Lacemaker (La Dentelli?re) from 1977 when she was 22 years old. There she was apple sweet in her red hair and freckles and her pretty face and her cute little figure playing Pomme, a Parisian apprentice hairdresser. Her character was shy about sex and modest--just an ordinary French girl who hoped one day to be a beautician. Here she is a self-destructive witch, bitter with hateful knowledge of herself, shameless and entirely depraved.
Huppert is fortunate in being an actress in France where there are parts like this for women past the age of starlets. (Hollywood could never make a movie like this.) In the American cinema, only a handful of the very best and hardest working actresses can hope to have a career after the age of about thirty. Huppert greatly increases her exposure because of her ability and range, but also because she is willing to play unsympathetic roles, here and also in La C?r?monie (1995) in which she plays a vile, spiteful murderess.
Do see this for Isabelle Huppert. You won't forget her or the character she brings to life.
Movie Review: I think I'll go back and hide behind Clementi
Summary: 2 Stars
I adored this movie in that it dispelled the simulacra of gracious living with classical music. I hated this movie in the shallow way it demonized bdsm culture, much as Irreversible demonized gay men.
I was suprised that a young carefree boy in love would suddenly turn judgemental when the object of his affections, his teacher no less, provided instructions for him to please her. I had difficulty making that leap. I was not surprised that a pianist, being a tactile creature, would chose manual engagement for arousal.
I thought the scene where Huppert pulled that little box of personal delights from beneath her bed had the greatest amount of compassion and empathy in the film. It was heartbreaking to see how small her world truly was.
Movie Review: Been done before, and was done better then!
Summary: 1 Stars
Some of the negative reviews of this movie might be for the wrong reason. Others don't quite articulate the reasoning well enough to be convincing. Maybe I can help?
I like philosophy, deep movies, and the French language - so I was looking forward to a fantastic film with compelling new material. Especially after reading how well it did at Cannes. Roger Ebert even gave it a big ol' bunch of stars.
Unfortunately, the only interesting themes (which were hinted at only tangentially) in this movie were said by psychoanalysts 80 years ago and Jean-Paul Sartre 50 years ago. Except the difference was that when those thinkers put their ideas out there, they did so in a compelling way that made sense of our innermost feelings and the world around us. This movie fails miserably in this respect, filling up holes in content with the most over the top violence and sex I've ever seen. I ended up watching the unrated version, which probably made the entire experience significantly worse than it would have otherwise been.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that people are rating this movie highly just because of the positive critical reception it got (Cannes, etc.). The emperor's new clothes phenomenon, you know. The acting is good - I can't imagine how challenging it must have been to play these roles. But that's about all I can say for this movie. Please get something else!
Movie Review: a biting sort of austrian humor ...
Summary: 5 Stars
Elfriede Jelinek was occupied e.g. with Condoleezza Rice. The present American Foreign Minister in her Denver-childhood was pushed by her parents exactly the same way into the role of a classical Pianist, as Elfriede Jelinek in Vienna had to experience this sort of oppression at her own body. In her novel "The Piano Player" the winner of the Nobel-prize (Literature) brings up for discussion in a satirical, sarcastic, cynical, yes shameless way, which sort of soul-destructive dominance mothers in their four domestic walls can unfold, if they are out-pushed from the public job-career-life (still generally the superiority is the male preference). The mother of Elfiede Jelinek after 1945 led negotiations on reparation payments at Austria with Russia - until male persons (leaving the prisoner-of-war-camps, returned, recovered) pushed away female persons from political functions and other jobs. Jelinek converts those experiences in her novel, filled up with certain autobiographic patterns, and there are parallels to the American Condoleezza Rice (by the way "Condi" learned Russian to be able to participate effectively at disarmament negotiations between the USA and the Soviet Union ). A stylish seeker of word-using Elfriede Jelinek chose the form of the ice-cold satire, maybe the best way, to reach the necessary distance against things, which have hurt a person very deeply. Franz Kafka by the way wrote probably less based in depression and despair than acting out of a control room of a tremendously biting Jewish humor: The ability to understand this sort of language-use was lost nearly completely after the extinction of the Jewish culture under the Nazi rule in the German-speaking countries . Jelinek therefore assumes, she is understood really correctly neither by the enthusiastic praising price lenders nor by rageful-hateful raving province journalists. Perhaps by Condoleezza Rice, if she had enough time to analyse such novels - and movie-scripts. Madeleine Albright, the Prague fled Rice- and Colin Powell-predecessor in the minister-office of foreign affairs, she is friendly with Condoleezza Rice; the two women noticed the structural comparability of their trauma: Albright, threatened with death by the Nazis and later on bored by the communists, Rice, colored, threatened by the race hatred in the Ku-klux-klan-environment of the 1960-years in the US Southern States. Elfriede Jelinek felt threatened by her prevail-addicted mother. The education-atmosphere at home had been formed by the typical middle-class-aim, to climb up the social ledder, in order to "make things better". Mother Jelinek (and the Rice-parents) focused the education-energy on the only child (a procession not divided, because there are existing no brothers and sisters). Condoleezza Rice became not a pianist (the at-first-wish of her parents and herself) but a Foreign Minister with energy-loaded rage on woman-despising Islamic states, unmarried and equally irreconcilably bitingly as the Austrian writer. Jelinek already for a long time didn't practice on her costly Steinway piano, but she became a language-composing Nobel-prize-winner - vulnerable, fighting against a disputable group of austrian politicians, but retired, fearfully withdrawn living, nevertheless relatively consolidated by a husband and by her special sort of biting humor. Condoleezza Rice, sometimes nicknamed as the US-American "war princess" or "Terminatrix", maybe the world shoud hope, that a little bit more of austrian humor and ability to see things ironically will find a way into Condi's strategy. Based on such comparisons and knowledge backgrounds about curriculi vitae, opposing the education-atmospheres of these women, you maybe understand the "Piano Player" in a more sophisticated way ...