Wednesday Minute
No. 89 | May 5, 2010

Plight of the Piano Player

Our theme this week
Piano-playing protagonists in peril

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le Pianiste) (1960)
Tuesday         —   Five Easy Pieces (1970)

The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) (2001)

Isabelle Huppert is one of the great names of French cinema.  For the role of Erika Kohut, a sexually repressed piano instructor at a conservatory in Vienna, she gives a shocking and memorable performance.  A woman in her forties, Erika lives with her domineering mother, sleeps with her mother, and secretly indulges in sadomasochism and self-mutilation.  Her taste for punishment extends to others as well, including insecure men and a female student she fears is a rival.

A young, attractive male student named Walter (Benoît Magimel) tries to seduce Erika.  She refuses his advances, then engages him in a cat-and-mouse game which fascinates, and disgusts, him.  Her motivations are colored by revenge against her mother, and the action leads to a final, violent climactic encounter with Walter.  Spoiler alert:  no happy endings here (you already knew that).  Erika gets to know better what she knows best:  pain.  She knows how to endure it, and inflict it—on others and on herself.

The bleak tale of The Piano Teacher was directed by Michael Haneke (Caché, The White Ribbon), adapting the novel of fellow Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004.  The film won three awards at Cannes, for actress (Huppert), actor (Magimel), and the festival’s Grand Prix (Haneke).

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The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste)
Michael Haneke, director
Trailer

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The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste)
Isabelle Huppert

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Quote of Note
“Playing piano is making you flip.  Stop it now!”
—Sami (Gilles Cohen), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)

…58…59…60.