Erika is a piano teacher. She is secluded, living a quiet life and sharing her apartment with her mother. However, ocassionally she disppears late at night to watch porn at various erotic stores. She gets a new student, Walter, in his 20s, who plays Schubert and wants to apply to the conservatory. Erika is against it. One day, she breaks a glass bottle and leaves it in the pocket of another student, Anna, whose right hand is thus injured. Realizing Erika was jealous at Anna because of him, Walter embraces Erika in the public toilet, where she masturbates him, but forbids him from touching her. She writes a letter to him, demanding that he tie her up and beat her in her room, while her mother is in the next room. Walter is disgusted by the letter, refuses it and leaves. Later, he arrives at her flat and slaps her. Before the start of a concert, Erika injures her shoulder with a knife in the lobby, and exits the building.
"The Piano Teacher" is a nerve-wretching psychological drama about sexual perversion caused by a person prevented from expressing her sexuality for a long time, and builds its unease from a peculiar blend of static long shots and uncomfortable anticipation, yet it once again shows that the director Michael Haneke is not able to properly end his stories. The film starts off as a boring music drama, featuring long sequences of the protagonist, Erika (excellent Isabelle Huppert), teaching students how to play a piano, all until it is shown how she secretly enjoys going to an erotic store to view porn there. She has a need for some wild passion, some exciting outburst in her sterile and boring life surrounded by classical music. In the second half of the film, Walter, a student in his 20s, finally realizes she is attracted to him, leading to a bizarre encounter in the public toilet: she unzipps his pants and starts masturbating him, but forbids him to touch her. She starts giving him a blow job, but then stops, ostensibly because he refuses her rules, but it seems she is never able to simply accept normal sexuality, and always has to stage some deviations to make it untypical. Instead of exploring this issue, the movie quickly drops it, as not much insight is given into Erika's mind. In one scene, while both are in their beds, Erika suddenly jumps on her mother and starts kissing her in the mouth, holding her arms, again demonstrating her misplaced urges, her inability to articulate her sexuality at the right place, the right person. We never see neither Erika nor Walter naked. They have only one sex scene in her apartment, wearing clothes. We are never shown what caused this sadomasochistic behavior in Erika (her letter with her wishes is disturbing), which is a pity. These movies stand or fall during their endings, which could give a great conclusion that sums everything down to a T. Unfortunately, the ending here is a cop-out, and thus feels incomplete and unfinished. Haneke is an artistic director, yet here he needed a better point at the end.
Grade:++
No comments:
Post a Comment