The Piano Teacher
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“You know, love isn't everything.”
Overview
Icy, confronting and indescribably moving— Michael Haneke's Cannes Grand Prix winning The Piano Teacher is a film that reaches to the edge of human experience. Erika (a transcendent Isabelle Huppert), a respected piano professor at a Viennese conservatory, lives with her mother in a claustrophobically codependent relationship, managing her unusual sexual desires through a tightly controlled paraphilic existence. The careful order of her life is unbalanced when she meets talented student Walter (Benoît Magimel), whose obvious desire for Erika comes crashing up against the emotional walls she's constructed as their unstable sado-masochistic relationship threatens to spiral into truly dangerous territory.
Why You Should See This Film
Based on the novel by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher is both a perfect example of Haneke's lens of unblinking austerity turned on moral turpitude, and a showcase for the extraordinary talent of Isabelle Huppert. Huppert (who alongside co-lead Magimel won Best Actress and Best Actor at Cannes) has worked with luminaries like Godard, Claire Denis, Hong Sangsoo and Claude Chabrol and possesses a particular knack for embodying a bourgeois woman on the edge, a stone facade that crumbles to reveal a full-blooded human, wretched yet empathetic in her perversity. A challenging and deeply rewarding journey, the Piano Teacher is essential viewing for anyone who would understand Haneke's worldview.
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