The Piano Teacher (2001)

Deep inside she (Isabelle Huppert) is completely broken. She has lived with the pain for years and has accepted that it is an inseparable part of her existence. There are nights when she even secretly cuts herself with a razor blade before she goes to bed because her body has become addicted to the pain and like a seasoned junkie now routinely demands a fix. Her elderly mother (Annie Girardot), who lives with her, is clueless.

At the nearby conservatory she is a classical piano expert with a busy schedule that does not leave her any time to make friends or have a lover. During the short breaks while she waits for the next student to arrive she is alone with her thoughts and frequently fantasizes about being humiliated, just like the moaning women in the fetish videos that she regularly watches in a popular sex shop not too far away from her home. She realizes that what she does isn't right but can't help it – her mind insists that if she can't end her dependence on pain this is the only type of 'love' that can coexist with it.

At a private recital she is approached by a handsome young man (Benoit Magimel) who shares her passion for classical music and also plays the piano. The man immediately makes it clear that he likes her and later on, while attempting to seduce her, applies for an open spot in her masterclass. They start interacting but the relationship quickly begins to disintegrate when it becomes clear that they have very different expectations of each other – he is looking for old-fashioned romance while she demands that he learns to humiliate her in a variety of different ways.

Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher is incredibly difficult to watch, but its directness is undoubtedly an essential element of its brilliance. Even a whiff of sugary melodrama would have made the film unbearably pretentious and ultimately unforgivably awkward.

The film is based on Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek's popular novel of the same name, but the profile of the teacher that emerges in the film is a bit different. In the novel she is a sick person whose tragic condition has very clearly transformed her into a victim that appears on the path of self-destruction. While examining her condition via the prism of her relationship with the younger student, however, the novel also looks at the social environment in which the teacher exists and attempts to identify a trail of cultural norms that have made it possible for her to remain untreated. In the film the line that separates the victim from the dangerous predator is largely blurred. Indeed, Haneke shoots the teacher as a deeply troubled individual but also someone whose casual decisions to hurt other people appear perfectly rational. So at the very least here the teacher is a hybrid character, part-victim, part-intellectual predator. (Pay attention to the measured abuse in the classroom that culminates in a well-calculated act that removes the young girl from her position as an accompanist for the singer).

Haneke's refusal to provide logical justification for the acceptance of the teacher's actions gives the film its edge because it an odd sort of way it actually legitimizes her condition as it is – a very disturbing but apparently possible to tolerate if present in the proper socio-cultural environment. There are endless red flags throughout the film revealing that there is something profoundly wrong with the teacher – from her exclusion from her colleagues' closed circle on the basis that her take on Schubert's work is different to the answers she offers to the distraught mother – but because of her academic status and ability to operate as a chameleon society basically chooses to ignore them, and then profiles her differently and even makes it easier for her to interchange her personalities.

Huppert's performance is sensational and it is hard to imagine that this film could have been made with anyone else but her playing the teacher. Magimel's transformation into her emotionally brittle student who struggles to understand her condition is just as spectacular.

Please Note: Playback of these H.265/HEVC encoded video files in VLC media player may cause problem (like Green Screen). A fresh install of the player or a new version can solve this problem. I strongly suggest you to download and install "K-Lite Codec Pack (Full or Mega version; totally free with WMP Classic)" on your system first and then try to play the file in VLC. Or, you can just install PotPlayer, and no codecs will be needed. I use this player for playing all sorts of media… from MP3 audio files to 4K UHD video files.

Mac users please get help from the Internet and YouTube.MS-CC

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