The Piano Teacher
La pianiste
Michael Haneke (2001)
Erika Kohut is a professor of piano at the Vienna conservatoire. She’s in her forties but lives at home with her fiercely possessive mother (they sleep not just in the same room but in the same bed). A sternly authoritative teacher, Erika returns to the apartment to be treated like a disobedient child; when this gets too much, she behaves like one. Other than taking part in musical events, Erika is socially isolated – because of the demands of her work and her mother, and her own personality. She expresses her sexual nature in acts of voyeurism and self-mutilation. By presenting the title character’s very different routines matter of factly, Michael Haneke makes their disjuncture all the more startling. As Erika, Isabelle Huppert creates a classic portrait of a person whose private life and habits go unsuspected, thanks to her isolation, her unremarkable appearance and her professional standing.
The Piano Teacher, adapted by Haneke from the Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel Die Klavierspielerin, centres on the development of a relationship that upsets the set pattern of the protagonist’s existence. Arriving at a recital at which she is to play, Erika and her mother (Annie Girardot) get into a lift. A young man appears. Erika promptly closes the lift door on him. As the lift ascends, on the landing of each floor the figure of the young man is glimpsed running. He and the lift’s passengers arrive at their destination simultaneously. The young man is introduced by Gerda Blonskij (Cornelia Köndgen), the hostess of the musical soirée, as her nephew, Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel). His sprint upstairs is just the first of Walter’s stratagems to attract Erika’s attention. On the margins of the recital, he engages her in conversation about classical music; at the end of her performance, he applauds conspicuously long and loud. Walter plays piano too; he’s currently an engineering student but applies to the conservatoire to study under Erika. He performs brilliantly in the audition. In the auditioning committee’s discussions, Erika is disparaging: she dislikes what she sees as Walter’s egocentric virtuosity, questions his motivation in applying and warns he’s already too old for a concert career. She is a lone dissenting voice. Walter gets a place in her class.
Walter soon (in screen time: Haneke eschews a detailed timeframe for the events of the story) makes clear to Erika that he wants a sexual relationship with her. She angrily rebuffs him. Things change when another of her students, the awkward, unconfident Anna Schober (Anna Sigalevitch) suffers an embarrassing attack of nerves before a concert rehearsal and Erika sees Walter giving Anna friendly reassurance. While the rehearsal continues, Erika slips down to the cloakroom; she breaks a glass and places the shards in Anna’s coat pocket. The girl cuts her hand badly as she prepares to leave at the end of the rehearsal. Her yells of pain and shock bring others to the cloakroom, Erika included, but she quickly leaves again and goes upstairs to a washroom. Walter suspects what may have happened and follows her there. He tries to embrace and kiss Erika. She insists that, if he wants her to cooperate, he must do as she says. Obeying that instruction results in what is, for Walter, a repeatedly painful and humiliating, and eventually frustrating, experience.
His consolation is that Erika proposes to write down a list of acts she will consent to in order for their relationship to advance. The list runs to several pages but the masochistic nature of the menu repels Walter. Desperate not to lose him and insisting that she loves him, Erika turns up at the rink where Walter plays ice hockey with his friends. In a room beside the changing area, he makes her fellate him but his ejaculation makes her vomit. Later that night, Walter turns up at the Kohuts’ apartment and, after locking her noisily protesting mother in the bedroom, beats and rapes Erika – as her wish list requested. They meet again the following evening at the conservatoire concert performance where Erika is to substitute for the injured Anna, having decided that no other student could at such short notice. As the audience prepare to take their seats, Erika waits in the foyer: her make-up hardly conceals the bruises from Walter’s assault and she has a kitchen knife in her bag. On the arrival of Walter, Gerda and her husband (Udo Samel), Erika exchanges brief pleasantries with them. They head for the auditorium. Erika takes out her knife and stabs herself in the shoulder. She leaves the concert venue and walks away down the street.
As in Funny Games (1997), Michael Haneke dramatises distressing and horrifying events with a dispassionate eye. A major difference is that The Piano Teacher constructs a more complex relationship between the director’s objectivity and the protagonist’s personality – one of two main reasons why this viewer found the later film more palatable. The other reason is Isabelle Huppert. According to Wikipedia, Haneke told her he wouldn’t make The Piano Teacher unless she played Erika and her performance vindicates his single-mindedness. At first, Huppert too is apparently objective. Although the opening domestic fight, in which she ends up pulling her mother’s hair, reduces Erika to helpless, contrite tears, Huppert presents her unusual sexual behaviour with a minimum of fuss – makes clear, in other words, that for Erika it isn’t unusual. She frequents sex shops to watch porn; as she sits in a booth, she calmly removes a tissue from the waste bin and sniffs the semen left on it by a previous viewer. She wanders round a drive-in cinema, spies on a young couple making out in their car, and urinates beside it. Just before dinner at home one evening, she goes to the bathroom to cut her genitals with a razor blade; her mother calls her to the table before Erika has time properly to stanch the blood. At the conservatoire, in her sensible skirts and blouses and her flat shoes, she has the appearance of a conventional bluestocking, and Huppert’s straightforward walk reinforces that impression. For the observant, though, there’s always much more going on in her face and gestures. The movement of Erika’s fingers during Walter’s audition is wonderfully expressive; so too the subtle softening and hardening of her face. Huppert’s stillness as Erika stands in the cloakroom, deciding on her revenge on Anna Schober, is chilling. What looked like objectivity on the actress’s part turns out to be fearless empathy with her character. Haneke’s dispassion sometimes reflects Erika’s lack of human warmth; when she’s distressed, his unblinking gaze has the effect of intensifying her predicament.
Benoît Magimel complements Huppert most effectively. Walter Klemmer is cocky – excessively aware of his good looks and charm – but can be considerate too. He soothes Anna Schober’s nerves; at the rink, as the hockey team swarms onto the ice and takes it over, Walter is the only one to apologise to a couple of girl figure skaters practising there. He makes a move on Erika out of a combination of genuine feelings of attraction and arrogance: he’s amused by the idea of warming and livening up this cold, unsmiling spinster. When, in their washroom confrontation, the teacher still insists on telling the pupil what to do, Walter’s pride is insulted: he expected that, once he compelled Erika to respond physically, he would be calling the shots. As the relationship continues, it’s his youthful as much as his male amour propre that’s wounded. Walter fancied himself as a daring young subversive in pursuing the affair. Middle-aged Erika’s sexuality is so much more unconventional than his own that it shocks him. Annie Girardot is excellent as Erika’s domineering but vulnerable mother, who needs to be in charge and relies on an aberrant domestic set-up to satisfy that need. Like Walter, though, she’s forced to recognise that Erika is driven to break the rules and go further – most powerfully in a scene in which the daughter exploits their abnormal sleeping arrangements by getting on top of the mother and trying to make passionate love to her.
What’s the connection between these pathological relationships and the classical music context of The Piano Teacher? I haven’t read the novel (or anything else by Elfriede Jelinek) but any such connection seems, on the face of it, surprising in a film by Michael Haneke. His work has repeatedly given the impression (most obviously in Amour) that he considers classical music a saving grace of humanity. Haneke doesn’t explicitly contradict that view here but classical music as a career aspiration or activity is shown in a very negative light. Erika’s father, whose life and work were also in music, is conspicuous by his absence. He long ago vacated the double bed that his wife and daughter now share. There’s a suggestion that an obsession with music drove him into the mental institution where he’s lived for years. His death occurs during the story but without having any obvious effect on Erika. Her own academic life is itself an expression of failure: she didn’t make it as the concert pianist her parents hoped she would be. The nervous wreck Anna Schober and her anxiously ambitious mother (Susanne Lothar) suggest another family relationship mired in musical ambition and bound to end in recriminatory and remorseful tears; there’s a grim implication that, by injuring Anna’s hand perhaps badly enough to prevent full recovery, Erika may have done the Schobers a favour. Although Haneke uses the music of Schubert et al as an elevating contrast to the manifold sordidness of The Piano Teacher, the persistence and, in effect, interweaving of the two elements makes them emotionally hard to separate.
Haneke creates atmosphere and realistic texture through images and sounds of corridors, stairways and swing doors but The Piano Teacher is not a thoroughgoing piece of realism. In plot terms, there are plenty of improbabilities. When Erika bumps into another of her students looking at girlie magazines in the kiosk adjoining the sex shop, you wonder how anonymous she really can be making repeated visits there. During their lengthy set-to in the washroom, neither she nor Walter seems to consider the possibility that someone else might come in. The noise that Walter makes when he comes round to the Kohuts’ apartment at dead of night is enough to wake the building well before Erika warns him to be quiet. In view of her uncontrollable prying, it’s a surprise that Erika’s mother seems not to have discovered the box of bondage gear under her daughter’s bed. Here’s a case, though, where the authority of the director and the command of a great actress combine to see queries like this irrelevant. Haneke and Huppert also ensure that what might have been merely a psychological case study is something more disturbing. Their lack of compromise denies the viewer safe distance from Erika Kohut.
19 February 2018