Old Yorker

  • The Piano Teacher

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • The Ornithologist

    Old YorkerFilm review

    O Ornitólogo

    João Pedro Rodrigues (2016)

    The title character is Fernando (Paul Hamy), travelling solo in a remote part of northern Portugal.  On the lookout for (rare?) black storks, he catches sight of the birds through binoculars.  Transfixed, he pays no attention to the currents of the lake on which he’s kayaking.  Fernando is swept away by rapids and his boat capsizes.  Two young Chinese women, Christian pilgrims journeying on foot to Santiago de Compostela, who’ve lost their way in the dense forest that surrounds the lake, discover Fernando’s unconscious body.  They revive him and the three have an evening meal together.  Fernando comments on the peculiar taste of the tea that Fei (Han Wen) and Ling (Chan Suan) give him to drink.  The taste is presumably down to the soporific the beverage contains.  Fernando wakes next morning to find himself stripped and bound with ropes to a tree.  The Chinese women refuse to release him.  Late that evening, Fernando manages to free himself, gather his clothes and backpack, and escape into the forest, unseen and unheard by the two women.  (Inside their tent, they discuss plans for castrating Fernando the next day.)  So begins the hero’s journey through a selva oscura – a terrain, in other words, both physical and spiritual.

    In the early stages of The Ornithologist, Fernando receives a succession of anxious texts from ‘Sergio’, urging him to make contact and to remember to take his tablets.  Who Sergio is – a life partner, friend or relative – isn’t made clear but Fernando’s links with, and identity in, the world he left to start his bird-watching expedition, successively disappear.  He finds that the eyes have been blacked out in the photograph on his identity card and that his fingerprint has been removed from it.  The Chinese women steal his map of the area.  The phone signal there is unreliable at best.  In time (or perhaps out of it), Fernando disposes of his mobile, the recording device he uses for his ornithological diary and his medication.  He comes across, in sequence, a mob of strangely masked hoodlums, who celebrate ecstatically their slaying of a wild boar; Jesus (Xelo Cagiao), a mute goatherd with whom he enjoys a brief sexual idyll before they argue and Jesus is accidentally stabbed to death; a stretch of forest populated by models of animals both indigenous and exotic; a white dove which seems to have a broken wing then to recover;  a human skull;  and a trio of bare-breasted deer huntresses (Juliane Elting, Flora Bulcão and Isabelle Puntel), whose leader insists that the ornithologist’s name is not Fernando but Anthony.

    The writer-director João Pedro Rodrigues (João Rui Guerra da Mata shares the screenplay credit) uses words of St Anthony of Lisbon as an epigraph to the film:  ‘Whoever approaches the spirit will feel its warmth, hence the heart will be lifted up to new heights’.  Anthony of Lisbon is better known as Anthony of Padua, patron saint of lost things;  he was born Fernando Martins in Lisbon in 1195.   In the episode featuring the dionysiac boar-killers, one figure – his fantastically-coloured costume suggesting plumage – sits apart from the rest.  In the climax to The Ornithologist, the protagonist encounters this figure at close quarters.  He turns out to be Tomé, twin of the slain Jesus, and demands to know why his brother died at the hands of Fernando/Anthony.  The latter’s shifting identity is reflected in the appearance at this point of João Pedro Rodrigues, whose face alternates with Paul Hamy’s, as the ornithologist’s throat is cut with the knife that belonged to Jesus.  The blood from the wound reddens the leaves of the trees overhead and the full moon above.  Rodrigues then cuts to a shot of a dead magpie lying on concrete and the sound of traffic – the first heard throughout the film.  Anthony (ie Rodrigues) and Tomé, still in his coat of many colours, walk beside the main road taking them into Padua.   The two Chinese girls appear, walking on the opposite side of the road and in the opposite direction.  When they call out ‘Fernando’, Anthony gives them the sign of the cross and they reciprocate.  Anthony and Tomé hold hands and disappear into the distance.

    Anthony’s metaphysical reflections to Tomé in the forest include:

    ‘There are certain things we shouldn’t try to understand.  They come to pass and we believe in them.  The fire of the Spirit is a mystery we will never understand but we must let it burn freely within us.’

    The closing shots and credits are accompanied by a tentatively upbeat love song whose lyrics begin with:

    ‘You are free, I am free

    And there’s a night to spend

    So why not spend it together?

    Why not take part in the adventure of our senses?’

    In spite of their different registers, both sets of words are predictably banal.  It’s the gay happy ending that hints at the film’s more interesting and distinctive qualities.

    With his political tunnel vision and voice-in-the-wilderness complex, Armond White is a reliably infuriating critic[1] yet his piece on The Ornithologist is worth reading.  This gay conservative reviews for Out as well as National Review:  on this occasion, his feeling for and knowledge of queer cinema gets the better of his reactionary side (although that side isn’t completely absent).  White seems to write more honestly than usual, safe in the knowledge that a film like this – foreign language, largely unknown actors – isn’t designed to make a splash in the mainstream press, let alone be widely seen.  (The Ornithologist has been shown at festivals and beyond since late 2016 but still has only fifty reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.)   João Pedro Rodrigues, now fifty-one, has been making feature films since 2000.  I don’t know his work but am prepared to believe White when, writing in an unusually sympathetic tone, he says that Rodrigues ‘always struggles with his gayness, usually in films filled with macabre, mysterious events’; and to agree with White’s description of The Ornithologist as a ‘strange, mesmerizing study of the transformation of gay consciousness’.  In contrast, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian – the kind of reviewer and  newspaper anathema to White – sounds as if, rather than engaging with the film, he’s merely saying what he thinks he ought to say.  Bradshaw describes The Ornithologist as a ‘dreamily erotic, playfully baffling and beautifully shot movie … a secular meditation on faith and acceptance’.

    As will be obvious from much of the above, Rodrigues’s film is replete with religious imagery and symbolism.  The hagiographic aspect extends beyond St Anthony:  as Armond White notes, the bound Fernando evokes St Sebastian.  The Chinese girls, before they turn on Fernando, express fears that spirits are at work in the forest; the rationalist Fernando assures them there’s no such thing as spirits or the devil or God but is compelled by his experiences to think again.  When Fernando/Anthony finds him, Tomé bears the fatal injury of his dead twin; in a twist on doubting Thomas feeling Christ’s wounds, Anthony inserts his fingers into Tomé (Thomas)’s wounds.  This also echoes a moment involving Fei and Ling before they meet Fernando:  one of the women cuts her knee; the other feels the wound and tastes the blood.

    The religious references don’t, as such, amount to more than a suggestive narrative design.  For most of its running time (just under two hours) The Ornithologist is visually compelling but its into-the-wild themes seem hackneyed and the pace is leisurely, to say the least.   You admire the landscapes – their coloration, the flow and force of water – that Rodrigues and his cinematographer Rui Poças create; you’re always aware there’s plenty of opportunity to admire them because not much else is going on in many of the images.  The queer elements in the material create a very different effect.   Although the texts from Sergio imply that Fernando is gay, his sexual orientation isn’t clear until he meets Jesus.  From this point on, it feels central.  The brief finale on the road into Padua may be a simple affirmation of gay togetherness but the lengthy, pretentious dark night of the soul that has preceded it suggests the protagonist’s self-realisation is hard won.  The ending makes you reflect on what you’ve watched and see things you noticed in a different light – the fear-of-women motif (the Chinese misandrists, the huntresses on horseback), the embattled masculinity and melancholy dignity of Paul Hamy’s Fernando.  (It makes emotional sense that Hamy is eventually physically eliminated.)    If Armond White’s summary of João Pedro Rodrigues’s film-making sensibility is correct, this interpretation makes The Ornithologist sound ridiculously self-dramatising and hyperbolic.  It is those things but it’s finally moving too.

    19 February 2018

    [1] One of White’s latest gems is praising Winston Churchill’s tube train dialogue as the highlight of Darkest Hour:  ‘[Joe] Wright’s canniest moment, in which the new, harried prime minister escapes Parliament and sneaks into the Underground, reveals Brexit-era populism as the film’s true theme. Our jaded, post-Obama media have poisoned the plausibility of this gesture, yet Darkest Hour initiates a genuine, modern approach to political heroism and the Western sagacity that is out of favor.  Wright imagines Churchill in actual conversation with “the people” rather than lecturing them that “that’s not who we are!” ’   

Posts navigation