The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste)
In ''The Piano Teacher,'' Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) comes home to her Vienna flat from a long day of excoriating her young piano students. It's night. The apartment is dark, save for the dull, distant light of a television set in another room. Before she can find a light switch or a lamp, before she can sneak into her bedroom, she is accosted, then attacked.
The assailant is her mother (Annie Girardot). She wants to know where Erika's been. They go at each other like two pets that bring out the wild animal in each other.
A few minutes later, Erika has slipped into a nightgown and crawled into bed; her mother is in the bed adjacent to hers, where she proceeds to remind her failed music prodigy of a daughter not to let her students eclipse her. Erika, half-asleep, receives this admonition almost unconsciously.
Welcome to another night in the Kohut household. And welcome to Michael Haneke's emotionally brutal ''The Piano Teacher.'' Haneke had a minor art-house breakthrough last year with ''Code Inconnu,'' a highlight of which is a scene where a man spits in the face of Juliette Binoche. The writer-director is radically uninterested in traditional notions of movie comeliness.
Adapted from Elfriede Jelinek's 1992 book, Haneke's new film (and Huppert's uncompromising performance) takes a nearly antiseptic approach to Erika, letting her pathology make a case for itself. Indeed, her most frequent outdoor attire - hair choked into a bun, nondescript trenchcoat topped off with thin leather gloves - is as incriminating as her most shockingly foul acts, most of which are directed at herself and, on one legendary occasion, one of her students.
In almost every sense, ''The Piano Teacher'' is about gratification and it discontents. Erika's crime is as simple and as complex as being her mother's daughter. As she climbs into bed with mom to her right, you sense that this has been going on for decades, one woman serving as a surrogate husband, the other as a father. Their nightly routine is as cruel as a Greek tragedy, yet grazes against the poignant farce of ''Groundhog Day.''
Looking for a way to please herself away from her omnipresent mother, Erika eventually embarks on an affair with Walter (Benoit Magimel), her most persistent charge - aggressively blond, aggressively statuesque, and seemingly sent down from either Olympus or the Alpine slopes. Until she gets involved with him, Erika has been visiting peep show booths, holding used tissues to her face like an oxygen mask, and cruising drive-in parking lots for voyeuristic titillation.
In one of the great, bizarre film trysts, she gets to try the real thing on Walter in a public restroom. It's a bravura encounter, loaded as much for what we've seen Erika do earlier as for what we learn about her partner in depravity.
A careless assessment reduces ''The Piano Teacher'' to a loose, live wire, horrifically in search of an audience to electrocute. But Haneke is not a sensationalist in the way we're accustomed to. For one thing, he's an exceedingly intelligent filmmaker whose finesse is fundamentally intellectual. He doesn't need to punch up this material with stylistic whipped cream the way a Polanski or Hitchcock would. He wants the behavior, not the cinema itself, to jar you. His observant camera is deadly still.
''The Piano Teacher'' is scandalous in subject without being alarmist in execution, which is how the film's last two confrontations gain their crushing dramatic force. Even the fearless Huppert - who with the surprisingly good Magimel and the indomitable Girardot are Haneke's secret weapons - conveys the film's restraint without exuding boredom or hauteur. Restraint is this movie's mystery and its miracle. No matter how gruesome it is, mercifully, it's always holding back.
Video
