La Pianiste | The Piano Teacher | Michael Haneke
Read here the Spanish version of this article.
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The second time I’ve been to an island, I departed with a lovely couple of Germans who were in their forties. They looked glowing, young and athletic, and even conserved their bodies thin. It was in part because they didn’t have kids. She couldn’t have them. Her name is Sarah. Her husband’s name is Jonas.
I was traveling with my ex-couple. We hung along pretty well with the Germans. At one point, they heard we were talking about a fantastic German film called Systemsprenger (System Crasher), about a little girl everyone would call a problem child.
We started speaking about cinema: Jonas recalled when he was 19 and watched with his father Benny’s Video (about a boy who films himself killing someone with a cattle gun), a disturbing film by the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, one of my favorite directors, despite having watched only four of his movies.
I also watched Benny’s Video and Funny Games (remake included). This week I watched La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher), another difficult yet enthralling project about a very complex character and different portraits of violence.
Those portraits are a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship who slap their faces at each other, a dominatrix that gets aroused pissing at the auto cinema while watching strangers fuck in their car, and a young man who falls in love and gets violent with the dominatrix, a sexually repressed piano teacher.
The Piano Teacher is also a subtle wink to the 4-Hour Life we endure daily, particularly those who have to commute to work. I.E., if you work eight hours, sleep eight hours, “commute/dinner/family time for a bit, that is 4 hours, and so then you have around 4 hours left in your day to yourself. The hours that belong to you. Roughly”.
This 4HL conclusion derives from a discussion between Erika, the piano teacher, and her mother: Might I know where you’ve been all this time?, reprimands the mother. Please, Erika replies. No, you don’t. Not until you tell me!, replies the mother back. Do you mind? I went for a walk. I spent 8 hours in my cage. I was tired and needed some air, repeats Erika.
Speaking of the time spent at work, I couldn’t avoid seeing the resemblance between Erika and Angela Martin from The Office. I would even dare to guess that Angela is partly inspired by the character of Erika: a cold-hearted woman with a heart of stone which tries to hide her feelings at all costs.
Erika is one of a kind: a rigorous piano teacher who constantly undermines her students’ morale until she falls in love with one of them. She teaches captivating pieces by Schubert, Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin at work. While not working, she watches porno at a video store and gets aroused smelling an ejaculated piece of toilet paper.
The movie is also about bodily fluids: semen, mucus, shit, blood, urine, and vomit. The semen appears in the scene I just described. Mucus: when the mother of a rejected student by the piano teacher tells her daughter, who cries: “Wipe your nose. What do you look like?”. That same girl has diarrhea before performing at a show. The cruel teacher is in charge of undermining her entirely by saying: “Are you scared or what? A pianist needs solid nerves”.
The piano teacher does not seem to have enough of what she’s done to her student. She goes to the dressing room to break a glass on purpose and puts the glass pieces broken on her student’s coat, cutting her and making her bleed. The urine appears when our protagonist goes to voyeur at the auto cinema to stalk strangers. Finally, the piano teacher pukes after giving a blowjob to the student she fell in love with. A very human, scatological movie.
I am refusing to speak about the end, in part because of its disturbance and in part because I don’t want to spoil it. But something terrible happens to the protagonist, paradoxically, in part because she pushed it. As I read once: “Even if a ray crushes into us, we must ask ourselves how are we involved”.
In this interview in The Guardian, Haneke leaves us in the limbo about interpreting the end:
“You have to interpret that yourself. I allow the spectator to finish the film in his or her head. Were I to provide an interpretation, that would be counterproductive”.
Fantastic, I must insist, difficult yet enthralling film. It was a 4.8 out of 5. I would recommend it, particularly if you like eerie and disturbing films.
You can read the other reviews here.
