Director – Michael Haneke – 2001 – Austria, France – Cert. 18 – 131m
*****
A masochistic piano teacher with an abusive mother embarks on an affair with a young male student – the opening film of Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Friday, June 6th
Warning: NSFW.
This is at once representative of Haneke’s wider body of work and very different from it.
Representative because he is one of those directors whose personal use of cinematic vocabulary has been so honed over his years of making movies that he is able to clearly and precisely articulate problematic, controversial and taboo ideas and subject matter that few directors would be able to handle without descending into exploitation or commercialism. He is a director steeped in cinema, fascinated by how the process of making a movie constructs the narrative or other viewing and listening experience, and how that is perceived and understood by audiences.
Different because although Haneke generally writes as well and directs his own films, they are mostly original pieces whereas this one is an adaptation of a book, The Piano Teacher / Die Klavierspielerin by Elfriede Jelinek. Essentially a character study of a woman exhibiting sexual dysfunction, there’s nothing else in his oeuvre (or any other filmmaker’s, for that matter) that I have ever seen that’s quite like it. Plus, it showcases a devastating performance by actress Isabelle Huppert – for this writer, the best thing she has ever done (even though she has subsequently worked with Haneke on three other films).
Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) has mummy issues. When she comes in later than expected, her mother (Annie Giradot from Hidden (Caché), Michael Haneke, 2005; Merci La Vie, Bertrand Blier, 1991; Rocco and His Brothers, Luchino Visconti, 1960) wants to know where she’s been. Worse, she takes her daughter’s handbag and starts going through its contents, taking out a dress her daughter has bought. They fight over it, the dress gets ripped.
Her shopping trip was a respite from her students. She teaches at a music academy in Vienna, the city where all this takes place (although, curiously given that these Austrian characters have Austrian names and would speak German, perhaps because he has cast a French actress whose skills as performer are to be pushed to their limits, Haneke makes this in French). Piano keyboard, pupil’s legs; several shots, different legs. Never let any of them play better than you, her mother exhorts her at one point, clearly a parent who wants her daughter to be the star performer she never had the chance to be.
Erika is indeed a gifted pianist, but at the same time is capable of terrible cruelty towards her students. The most gifted of whom, the teenaged Anna Schober (Anna Sigalevitch), Erika can’t quite seem to draw out the talent within her. Anna is being pushed in her musical studies by her mother; the overbearing Mrs. Schober (Susanne Lothar from The White Ribbon, 2009; Funny Games, 1997, both Michael Haneke; The Reader, Stephen Daldry, 2008) seems far more determined that her daughter should become a brilliant pianist than her daughter does.
While Anna is performing at a recital for which they have been rehearsing for weeks, Erika leaves the auditorium and goes to the cloakroom, where she breaks a glass tumbler in a scarf taken from another peg, then carefully drops the broken glass fragments into the girl’s jacket pocket so that, on donning the garment later, she will lacerate one hand. The enables Erika to then callously instruct the student to work on her undamaged, weaker hand during her recuperation.
And what of Erika’s walks after hours to escape from her pupils? Early on, she enters a sex shop, waits amidst other customers, all of whom are male, for her turn in a cubicle, and then once inside, after the briefest of shots of a four-way split screen showing four different sets of male-female genital interaction, picks out the used tissues of previous customers and slowly sniffs them. On a later occasion in the same shop, she runs into one of her students from the Academy and threatens to talk to his mother about his presence there.
In terms of domestic arrangements, at night Erika sleeps beside her mother in the same bed. The whereabouts of Erika’s father are never clear. We never see him, and on one occasion her mother, who Erika has told not to call her and taken steps to prevent her doing so, berates her, when she later returns, that her father had died that day. This elicits no reaction from Erika, as if he and his death mean nothing whatsoever to her.
Earlier on, Erika attends an invitation only recital by the gifted young pianist Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel from The Taste of Things, Tran Anh Hung, 2023; A Girl Cut in Two, Claude Chabrol, 2007; La Haine, Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995; Life is a Long, Quiet River, Étienne Chatiliez, 1988). After he has played, he buttonholes her, and they discuss the challenges of playing Schubert and Schumann. He is an admirer of her playing who wishes to study under her at the Academy, and she informs him bluntly that he will have to apply via the usual applications procedure. When his subsequent interview recital garners much enthusiasm among her colleagues, she voices her objections, saying she doesn’t think she has anything to teach him. She is overruled and he becomes her student.
He becomes much more, too, because they feel something for one another. While his feelings for her are fairly normal, hers for him are perverse. He initiates a physical encounter with her after peering over an Academy lavatory cubicle to find her; she takes control of the situation, initiating a blow job but not taking him as far as ejaculation, instead making him stand before her unfulfilled and frustrated in his state of arousal.
She writes him a letter, which she wants him to read before they take things any further. When he opens it, it runs for a few pages and appears very detailed: it’s her instructions for how she wants to be treated in their physical encounters.
He turns up at her and her mother’s flat, catching her as she returns and getting her to invite him in, despite the protestations of her mother. On Erika’s instructions, Walter secures the bedroom door to keep her mother out, blocking it shut by placing a wardrobe in front of it. She refers him to the latter, and he struggles to comply with its demands. It is clear that he is in love with her, and wants to do the right thing, but finds her demands, as he attempts to work through them, near insurmountable. In a further scuffle with Erika’s mother, he locks her in a room which has a lockable door. His getting the mother out of the way is one thing; dealing with the daughter is quite another.
The spectre of Hitchcock, and the domineering mother figure which recurs in that director’s films, is never far away. An early bathroom scene (bathrooms are also a thing in Hitchcock) in which Erika self-harms using a razor blade between her legs, and blood drops onto the side and bottom of the bath, which Erika obsessively cleans afterwards – very reminiscent of Norman Bates in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960, the one Hitchcock film Haneke has cited as among his personal favourite movies in published lists) – is an act of rebellion against her mother who can be heard offscreen asking her to come to the table for supper. Both Erika’s mother, and the mother of Erika’s star student Anna, are overbearing and possessive types who could have easily stepped out of any number of Hitchcock’s films.
All of which adds up to a searing portrait of female sexual dysfunction, with Huppert giving not only the performance of her career to date, which with an actress of her stature is really saying something. Acting is all about trust in the piece, the director and the performance, and what Huppert finds within herself here, with the help of director Haneke, and shows us on the screen, is one of the greatest performances in all cinema.
This doesn’t feel exploitative in the manner of porn made to titillate or arouse; that is absolutely not what this is, and Haneke doesn’t deal here in the pornographic moving image’s established language or syntax. What he’s after is something else entirely: human connection (or lack of it) in terms of our sexuality, and all the factors that can come into play in its practice, such as the role s played by an overbearing or absent parent. To watch this in a cinema, where one is in a dark space, entirely focused on the sound and image with no external distractions, is a thoroughly absorbing, compelling and challenging experience.
It may be about as extreme and harrowing as any movie you’ll ever see, and has lost none of its power to shock in the near quarter-of-a-century since it was made, and remains a masterpiece with much to tell us about certain aspects of the human condition.
It is in this writer’s opinion both Haneke’s finest film and Huppert’s greatest performance to date, which makes it a curious choice as the opening film in a Haneke retrospective when one might want to save the best ’til last.
The Piano Teacher is the opening film of Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Friday, June 6th.
Retrospective Trailer: