Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Benoit Magimel

Director: Michael Haneke

Screenplay: Michael Haneke

Running time: 2 hrs 5 mins

Genre: Foreign Film/Drama



CRITIQUE:

A piano teacher, especially French, has a lot of reasons to be a romanticist. Music and romance can be the champagne and caviar to besotted lovers. However, this is not that tale. Instead, L A PIANISTE is a dark, brooding foray into the lethal flipside of love; a complex, psychologically disturbing exploration on sexually-charged feelings gone haywire. With the elements presented, thereby this is no easy watch, certainly not a walk in the park. This is a slow-burning, thinking film, and it shocks you in places where you least expect.


The main protagonist is the titular professor Erika Kohut, an impossibly stern, fractiously forbidding form of a human being, whose smile is as dry as ice. Seeing students suffer under her tutelage is her secret amusement. But deep down inside, there is a pent-up, sexually repressed fortysomething woman whose greatest desire is a list of masochistic fantasies. So when a handsome student Walter falls in love and discovers her ravishes, the table is turned and he is nothing short of disgusted. What could have been a pursuit of impossible love becomes a demented, perverted trip to madness, with scenes that speak of daring honesty; one stand-out is the encounter in the bathroom where Erika demands an upper-hand, another is the riveting climax scene in the apartment where she gets her wish and he turns into an intruder.


It can be an appalling watch to many, and it is easy to assume that the majority won’t like the character of Erika. She’s selfish, arrogant, envious, perverted; she’s not the person to sympathise with. Yet she’s devastatingly human, ridden with anguish, despair, and fraught with self-humiliation – that’s how amazing the performance of Isabelle Huppert is. Watch her transformation from a strict, severe disciplinarian to a passive, hopeless woman-in-need. Beside her is a solid actor Benoit Magimel, who plays Walter Klemmer as an intelligent student, not struck by folly love but by passion.


After all, Michael Haneke doesn’t make easy-to-watch films. His works are mostly agonising to view, but he lets his audience to make an impression on his characters and surprise them with raw-edged humanity. He takes long shots of empty spaces where his humans can freely move and express. And given the subject matter of the film, he veers the student-teacher relationship story into a deeper, distraught level that is haunting and wholly intriguing. The 2002 Cannes Grand Prix was a worthy prize.



VERDICT:

An emotionally cruel exploration into the disturbing territory of masochist fantasies, but moreover, LA PIANISTE is a mesmerising tale about sexual anguish, maddening frustrations, and lost love, all rooted by a magnificent performance by Isabelle Huppert. Unconventional and unforgettable.



RATING: A