{ Thursday, July 3, 2003 }
What a powerful film. This is incomplete, but I wanted to put it up while I still had it fresh in my mind.
One of the great things about foreign films is that they don't do your imaginational spadework for you -- you have to do it all for yourself. If The Piano Teacher were being made here, the producer would put it before a preview audience who would inevitably grouse that they didn't understand it. Then the producer would insist that the director make the subtext explicit, fill in the backstory, and in so doing effectively eliminatethe heart of the film.
Erika, the piano teacher of the title and played by Isabelle Huppert, is a cipher. She is pale and schoolmarmish, wearing tweed skirts and cardigans. She teaches at a highly competitive and exclusive music school where she is strict and cold with her students, dispensing withering put-downs rather than encouragement. She is passionate about Schubert -- the amour fou composer par excellence, who contracted syphilis, wrote Death and the Maiden and lost his mind. She lives with her domineering mother, who flies into jealous rages whenever she comes home late. And she goes out at night to peep shows where she sniffs the dirty tissues that were left there by prior visitors, and then to a drive-in movie, where she watches couples having sex in their cars. A student, Walter Klemmer, falls in love with her, and here the trouble begins.
Erika's desire has been forced to run in the narrowest channels. On the one side is her controlling mother, who decides what she should and shouldn't wear, strategizes her career, and believes her to be the most important pianist in all of Vienna. Her father, now dead, was insane. Something has made her strong -- strong, but also ferocious. She insists that should she ever have any emotions, she will force her intellect to prevail over them. And yet we see her in the bathroom, cutting herself.
I saw The Piano Teacher as being in the longstanding tradition of the French amour fou film, which includes such classics as Mississippi Mermaid, Last Tango in Paris, The Woman Next Door, Belle de Jour and Betty Blue. But Erika has more character than all the women in these combined -- even the title "The Piano Teacher" implies that she has a career, agency, capability, authority. While these other movies are extensions of the male POV, this film has a decidedly female gaze. Take, for example, the scene in which Erika goes to the peep show. She buys her tokens, but then all the booths are taken, so she has to wait. A bunch of men are loitering around the smut shop, and there is an awkward moment when they look at her and each other, as if to say What is *she* doing here?. Implied is that she does not have the right to what is clearly the realm of the male gaze.
LINK | 12:19 PM | TB
Without question, one of the most powerful films I’ve ever seen. Danse Macabre of filmmaking, which is at its highest order here. The entire films is a brilliant, madding, examination of female and male to female sexuality, but as you pointed out, set deeply within the gaze of the female psyche. For that, a highly original film. Can anyone name another film where female sexuality is so artfully, if not honestly yet so basely rendered? Please don’t say ‘The Story of O’. I’m troubled to think of any…. (‘blue’ perhaps)
I had so much the same reaction as you had when I first saw the film (alas on DVD). Perhaps shock, horror, love, passion and joy all travel down the same roads, at times intersecting (at the crossroads of repression) in certain relationships, as seen here. The scene of sexual control in the bathroom is perhaps one of the best scenes in recent memory. The male actor ought to be mentioned because the two create such a vivid world together. I believe he won best actor at cannes, deservedly.
Throughout, I couldn’t help but think of the surrealist poets, those mad lovers, driven to despair, fits of passion, echoed throughout each of these scenes. (Mary Ann Caws edited a great book on their mad love poems)…that entire sense of mad love carries this film but what makes this film is the overbearing repression on Huppert.
In this, Huppert is an absolute siren of the screen. She is, quite obviously, quite talented in at her profession, but one must wonder if she's also jealous of the insanity that consumed Schubert own life and inherently fed his compositions. I wonder if Erika, in order to push herself to understand Schubert or his art, drove herself to that next level of insanity in carrying on the way she did. All throughout the film, I was trying to understand her motives. What makes her act, almost as if out of compulsion or habit, as if out of a Reage novel. Even at her gilded age (and I’m 25), I found she has this striking ability to lights the entire story with a sexually of charged despair only found in teenage youth (think Romeo and Juliet). Her anger, at herself, her control, her repression, her mother, her muse, is shockingly well acted. She never wants to let go. Her face says everything and nothing. Everything is taut, weighed, in a few words: under her spell. Throughout the film you see her let go of all these things. To give into someone, to a feeling other than an all-consuming control. The last scene, as her lover leaves her (you have to see it, I wouldn’t give it away)…literally broke every heart string.
A classic.
lincoln | July 3, 2003 3:45 PMopps. that was my review for Legally Blonde 2! my bad.
lincoln | July 3, 2003 3:49 PMI thought it was a brilliant movie. One of the best on my list. After watching it and not knowing the premise beforehand I was left wordless and then giggling in a fit of recuperation. There are very few pieces of literature, film or game and internet experiences that leave me feeling like I have woken from a very lucid dream. In fact, this movie made me feel temporarily insane as if I had picked up some sensibility from the film that I had no control over. This has only happened to me on one other occasion when I read "Surfacing" by Margaret Atwood.
The part of the movie that I find completely brilliant is the way the audience is pulled into understand Erika's point of view without questioning her desires. When Walter comes to Erika's house and begins to beat her there is a waffling in your brain between "Yah, this is good she's getting what she desires" and "No, this is not right". In the end you are not sure what to think but feel like you have experienced someone else's life for a moment.
Typically, in N.A. and British culture there must always be a moral to the story. This character is evil, this one is good, this one is this and that. Have you ever noticed in Hollywood films that there is always a sequence toward the end of the movie that somehow surmises the entire movie. Just in case we didn't get it.?! Watch next time -- it comes in many forms.
Yes, The Piano Teacher is a must see, but don't watch it without having some time to process it. Don't expect to go right to bed.
julie | July 3, 2003 6:11 PMI saw piano teacher at a recent film festival... one of 5 films at the festival which some people had tried to ban!
I haven't seen a film so disturbing since todd solondz's 'Happiness'
But I loved it, disturbing sure, but sometimes you need that...
if you like that french amour fou, have you tried "the dream life of angels" or "the venus beauty institute"
One thing that I love about Huppert was her enormous strength in such a submissive character
scottbp | July 3, 2003 9:44 PMA truly great work of art. I heard an interview with Huppert, where she said that her character longed to live in a bourgeois world that no longer existed, a fin de siecle world of intimate piano recitals of new works, political debates, lectures etc. in the salons of black-tie friends. The film is extremely French in its anti-bourgeois, no- hope-for-metaphysical-release mindset. (see also La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M)
As per it being any kind of au courant feminist statement, I dunno... her mother is the abusive husband, her student is her sado-masochistic fantasy ( see also Secretary with James Spader), her disciplined art of interpretation, and her passion for it, is deeply Victorian and rigid, and somehow unfit for the postmodern world.
She's artistically blocked. To me it's more a portrait of the classical artist as repressed anal-sadistic warrior, to borrow a phrase from Mathew Barney.( see also J. Chasseguet-Smirgel's Creativity and Perversion). The character's gender and orientation is mostly interchangeable. A short, closeted, gay man in a cravat could have taken her seat in any scene.
tim | July 4, 2003 12:50 AMSounds very Kieslowski-ish.
You're right. It's hard to find American films that explore such subtle psychological/moral ambivalence. In current American indies, there's always the urge to be clever and demonstrative in some way.
Sadly, most of the general population where I live wouldn't have made it past the first sentence of your post. Okay, maybe the second sentence.
Another effect of that is the fact that our county just doesn't get foreign film at all. There's one community theater that occasionally runs foreign films, but it's more than an hour's drive away.
Thanks for your post of this film, one to put on my list.
Is that is same Death and the Maiden that Sigourney Weaver was in? Just wondered.
Mike | July 6, 2003 9:38 AMMike, the movie you're referring to centers on a piece of chamber music by Schubert, String Quartet in D minor, known as Death and the Maiden. It is an amazing, passionate, mad piece of music, and in the movie you mention, directed by Roman Polanski and based on a play by Ariel Dorfman, was the piece of music the diabolical Ben Kingsley character did or didn't play while he was or wasn't torturing the Sigorney Weaver character in some unnamed South American country. (The question of whether he did it or not is the main trajectory of the film, which I won't reveal).
I think one of the main reasons I loved The Piano Teacher is that I also adore Schubert and studied piano myself for 11 years -- my sister was a tremendously accomplished pianist who played dozens of recitals like the one in the movie.
I think the reason "The Piano Teacher" was released in English speaking countries under that title, rather than as "The Pianist" (its title in French) was because "The Pianist" by Roman Polanski was released around the same time. (And I thought that movie was a good movie-as-movie, but a lousy Polanski movie -- for the same reasons of moral and narrative ambiguity I mention in this post.... But I digress.)
Tim, I don't think I'd call "The Piano Teacher" a feminist film (I didn't, nor did anyone here) except in the very broadest sense of the term -- as a woman's experience. "The gaze" is a highly politicized term, however, so maybe that is what you were referring to.
I also don't think you can translate characters into different genders, i.e. mother=abusive husband, erika=gay man. The decisions of the author were: mother, woman. These and not others. It makes men uncomfortable to see into women's experience -- especially when their sexuality is not being controlled by them -- so much that they have to translate it into male experience. Thus the widespread belief in peanut galleries everywhere that TV shows such as Absolutely Fabulous, or Sex and the City are veiled stories about gay men.
It makes me angry when powerful women are destablized as women and claimed for the patriarchy. Someone in my family used to claim he liked his secretary because she "thought like a man". Pissed me off to no end. She thought exactly like a woman, damnit.
Caterina | July 6, 2003 12:27 PMThe gaze thing is extremely politicized, point very taken, however... upon reflection, I am now sure I was appropriating a comment from Huppert about the mother being the character's husband, or, ahem, "husband", as the case may be. (Remember the bit where she tries to come-on to her mother in bed?)
If it's strictly female or another experience, interchangeable or not, me not comfortable or you... again, I'm not sure. Maybe all of the above. I am not for any either-or claim. I' only meant to argue for its multiplicity, not against its feminity. Identifying deeply with the character does not make me think she is like a man, or that I am like a woman.
Of course, Lacan says all interpretation is a form of aggression, so that includes me and you ... but above all Huppert, I suppose : )
tim | July 7, 2003 7:36 AMThe movie is about the appeal of *giving in* to madness. The appeal for the insane is to just give in and dive off the cliff in a magnificent swan dive and the appeal for others is the excitement that comes from being around mania, - of course not recognizing it for what it is, but still appreciating the mystery it can make of its victims. (Hence Walters interest in her.)
She is rigid because she knows she is going mad - like her father - and is trying to contain herself.
Walter beats her because people try to destroy things that they don't understand/threaten them. (Is he trying to beat some *sense* into her?)
He really has no concious idea that there is something wrong with her, he just reacts with animal instinct.
The movie plays with the idea of madness as a return to our animal nature - that is why sex is such a factor in this story.
Speaking as a manic, I must add I agree 100% with all that.
tim | July 7, 2003 1:31 PMi saw the film when it had its theatre run in copenhagen. just curious, but did anyone laugh at the very last picture (erika stabs herself)? that was my reaction, as well as that of many other patrons. i thought it was an ironic anti-climax, kind of a 'so there' finish to a painful tale, but when i shared my thoughts with a non-dane, the reaction was quite different.
christian | July 8, 2003 8:49 AMthe ending was perfect! Not laughable at all. Granted, albeit a bit childish and manic to just poke yourself but i question if one has ever been in love and lost and not felt the same drama stir within; such an intense urge to cut out the part of them that is hurting the most.... as erika did here.
look, dear, i've gone and spoiled it for everyone now.
lincoln | July 8, 2003 5:19 PM{ Post a comment }
So many people had commented on this film when I mentioned I was going to see it that I figured I'd devote a whole entry to it.
Tell me what you thought about it!
(And yes I realize that this film was set in Vienna and directed by an Austrian, and that two of the films I mentioned had Italian and Spanish directors, but since they were in the French language I felt justified in calling it the French amour fou film.)
Caterina | July 3, 2003 11:37 AM