A Night of Pain - The Piano Teacher

At roughly 8:30 pm on February 20, 2009 – a Friday, as I remember – I began to follow through on what turned out to be a fairly bad idea. Not a thoroughly horrible idea, fortunately, but still, all things considered, not a great one, either. The idea, as some of you may be aware, was to watch three movies, in a row, which, over the years, had each attained a level of infamy due to their unpleasant and shocking content. These films are considered to have an effect on the viewer not dissimilar to a kind of psychological assault. Even if the viewer ultimately considers these films to be good, he or she can’t exactly claim to be happy to have made the decision to watch them.

Some people, when faced with the opportunity to watch such films don’t hesitate to do so. I believe that some such people consider it a badge of honor to have these particular notches on their belts. “Oh, you haven’t seen that movie?” they like to be able to say. “Is it because you can’t handle watching live dogs fed into a trash compactor? It’s all fake, you know. Anyway, I didn’t have much problem with it, myself. Besides, as a film, it’s quite fascinating to see how the director constructs the mise en scene in such a way as to make the audience complicit in the action. For you see, in the cinema…” and so on until you want to throw your drink in their face.

Then again, some of them are simply curious, or fascinated by the grotesque. I know I am! And that curiosity and fascination, no matter how I try to distance myself from it, is what brought me here today, reasonably fresh from viewings of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside, and, the granddaddy of all such films, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. I chose to watch the films in ascending order of infamy, which, by my calculations, put The Piano Teacher at the front of the line. And so, as I mentioned before, last night at 8:30, after a lovely dinner with my wife (who chose not to take part in this, and to retreat to the TV in our bedroom), I began.

Part One: Mild Discomfort

Or maybe not so mild, really, but I’m trying to build to a kind of crescendo by the end. You understand, I’m sure. But it’s true, the phrase “mild discomfort”, as applied to The Piano Teacher, doesn’t really cut it. Michael Haneke is actually something of a genius when it comes to making films that slide into the brains of the audience and start vigorously scratching. Apart from the weak pose of a film that is his overrated Funny Games, I have been absolutely riveted to the point of frozen existential terror (okay, that’s probably an exaggeration) by Cache’, Code Unknown, The Castle and, most especially, the brilliant The Seventh Continent. And now again here, with The Piano Teacher, whose titular character is played brilliantly by Isabelle Huppert.

The teacher’s name is Erika Kohut, and at the end of every day, which she spends teaching highly talented piano students, and training them for the big leagues, she goes home to her apartment, which she shares with her mother (Annie Girardot), who is quite critical of her daughter, and who seems to have something to do with the reserved and repressed woman Erika seems to be. Except that Erika isn’t really repressed, or maybe she was, and when she eventually fought through the repression, it was like a dam bursting, complete with all the resulting carnage.

The first time we realize something might be up, in a small way, is when she meets a young man named Walter (Benoit Magimel). He is something of a piano prodigy, and Erika clearly likes him (though she will eventually be the sole vote against him when he applies in front of a panel of music teachers for a place in Erika’s master class), or at least finds him fascinating. The bulk of their first conversation together, however, involves Erika talking about the details of the madness of Schubert and Schumann, her two favorite composers.

So, she’s interested in madness. Who isn’t? The problems, and the discomfort, begin when we start to see Erika away from her mother and students, which doesn’t really happen until about a third of the way into the film (this is one of the things that distinguishes this film from the next two in this triple feature). And the first thing we see her do, when completely left to her own devices, is go to a sex shop – if that relatively mild term is really the one I want here – and go into a booth where she feeds a machine coins so she can watch hardcore pornography (which Haneke shows us, too). Although Erika may take advantage of this service in the manner that we would all initially expect her to, we don’t see that. What we do see is Erika picking up the used tissues of the male customer who preceded her in this booth, and smell them. Watching that, I thought, “Finally! I’m uncomfortable! And I thought this project was going to be a bust!”

That action, paired with the hardcore images, made me think that I should probably prepare myself for anything and everything. Now, this film is much more than a series of shocking episodes, stacked one on top of the other, but in fairly short order we are treated to a scene where Erika retreats to her bathroom at home so that she can slice at her, ahm, area, with a razor blade, and another where she goes to a drive-in and walks around until she finds a couple having sex in the back seat of their car. While spying on them, she starts to urinate. The guy half of the couple having sex sees this and, as any of us would, gets very angry and yells at Erika until she runs off. I can understand the guys anger, but really, if you’re going to have sex in public, people are going to want to watch you while they pee. That’s always been part of the deal.

Eventually, Erika begins a…I guess you’d call it a relationship, with Walter, though it’s a relationship that holds a lot of frustration for the young man. By the end of the film, I had far less sympathy for him than I did when Erika first began her incredibly sadistic tease, because it turns out that he’s kind of a scumbag. But we don’t know that at first, and initially I could share his frustration at being strung along by Erika, until the scene where she finally, and meekly, shares with him a list of violently masochistic desires she has – she would like to punched a lot, for one thing – that would, one hopes, give any man pause. Except that it’s at this point that my sympathies more or less completely shifted to Erika, who up to this point had seemed cold and mean and frightening, because she suddenly becomes shy and fearful of rejection, not to mention deeply embarrassed by her own desires, yet hopeful that Walter will understand. Well, he doesn’t. And he’s not kind in letting her know that. This long series of scenes ends with the film’s biggest shock (even though it’s not graphic, it’s still a corker), one which devastates Erika and makes her desperation for Walter so great that she follows him to hockey practice and promises him everything he could want from her. Though he claims he’s disgusted by her, he’s willing to use her neediness to get sex from her, an act of vicious selfishness that leads to this charming bit of dialogue, delivered by Walter: “You should wash your mouth out more, not just when my cock makes you puke.”

Boy, how many times have I had to say that in my life!? Also, spoiler alert.

So, shocked I indeed was by the first film in my triple feature. But I was also – and not to change tones too suddenly, I hope – quite moved by Huppert, who, despite the film’s extreme subject matter, is actually amazingly quiet in her brilliance here. And Haneke shoots it all in his typically cold style, moving his camera to a distance just far enough back to allow us to see all the little details of Erika’s life, the things that sum her up, even though you still can’t really explain her.

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End of Part One. This will not, as I previously claimed, be one long post, but rather three longish posts, because otherwise no one would finish. Plus, I would have run out of steam by the end, and my writing would have suffered, and nobody wants that. And let's not forget that by splitting this into three parts will raise my post count, which for some reason I seem to care about. Anyway, now we all have an opportunity to visit loved ones, maybe get something to eat, and ultimately regroup before settling down to deal with Inside. And boy do I ever have an opinion on that one. Stay tuned.