Also this issue:

Future Tense
Fighting destiny and city hall in Minority Report.
-Sam Adams

Cold Fire
Inuit storytelling makes the jump to the big screen with Atanarjuat.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks

Movie Interview
with Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn
-Cindy Fuchs

new

June 20-26, 2002

movies

Cruel Tunes

agony and ivory: Erika (Isabelle Huppert) and Walter (Beno”t Magimel) make twisted music together.

S&M meets Shostakovich in The Piano Teacher.

THE PIANO TEACHER

by Sam Adams

THE PIANO TEACHERDirected by Michael Haneke A Kino release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse

RECOMMENDED

Arriving just weeks after the Philadelphia debut of Michael Haneke’s multifaceted Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher shows a less expansive side of the Austrian filmmaker. Where Code flung its tendrils in numerous directions, The Piano Teacher is an almost monolithically focused character study. Erika (Isabelle Huppert) is a piano teacher whose method of instruction is equal parts musical exaction and psychological intimidation. Students whose resolve weakens aren’t punished so much as destroyed. Erika lives at home with her mother and seems to have little time or patience for men, until the wealthy, fair-haired Walter (Beno#206t Magimel) comes into her life. Unaccustomed to not having his way, Walter hears Erika play at a private recital, and is possessed. She looks on him like a pup, disdaining his facile understanding of Schubert, his easy good looks. She returns home, to the repressive mother (Annie Girardot) who shreds the pretty clothes she brings home, and perches on the side of the bathtub, gingerly applying a razor to her nether regions while her mother prepares dinner in the next room.

The Piano Teacher is full of such moments of deadpan brutality, but Haneke never resorts to mere voyeurism. Huppert drains the comedy out of her role, even at moments where a lesser actor would wink at the camera; when a stranger bumps into her in a mall, Huppert waits a moment before wiping at the point of contact, not allowing the gesture to develop into a tic. When she counsels a student to play a passage as if it represents "the obstinacy of the complacent middle-class," there's no irony in her voice, no remove from the moment. The Piano Teacher feels too narrowly focused, as oppressively narrowed as the characters it depicts. There's a certain integrity in that approach, but a certain narcissism as well, as if turning the audience's stomach were an end in its own right. The Piano Teacher's remove is what gives it strength, but it's also what makes it uncomfortable to watch. We never get close enough to the characters to do more than stare.