The Piano Teacher

The Piano Teacher (2001) is about a pianist teaching at the Vienna Conservatory and her relationship with a student. Erika Kohut is in her forties and still shares a flat and a bed with her mother, who controls everything: the money, the clothes, what time she comes home. In class she is merciless, breaking her students and finding none of them adequate. A student named Walter shows an interest. She gives him a letter setting out in detail what she wants. Reading it horrifies him. What the film does is neither endorse that desire nor reduce it to pathology. Erika can express her own wanting only as a list of instructions, because she has no other language; she has never chosen anything in her life. Walter refuses at first and then does the opposite, and that scene is the hardest passage in it. It is adapted from Elfriede Jelinek's novel; she received the Nobel in 2004. Haneke's usual coldness is here: no score, a still camera, few cuts. The only music is what is played: Schubert and Schumann. What Erika says about Schubert is the passage that describes the character best. At Cannes in 2001 the film took three prizes at once: the Grand Prix, best actress and best actor. It was Isabelle Huppert's second acting award there. Benoît Magimel plays Walter. A scene of self harm and a scene in a cinema are extremely distressing. It runs 131 minutes. Good for: Haneke, hard character drama, and European cinema. Less good for: sexual violence and self harm are shown openly and the film softens nothing.