In which film savant Iggy Cortez recommends we find our inner music-lover.

Micheal Haneke’s Caché was probably last year’s best film, an engaging anti-thriller about repressed personal and national guilt. However, it was not the first time Haneke had confronted his audience with universal ethical dilemmas. In movies such as Funny Games and Code Inconnu, Haneke had been experimenting with violence against the spectator, criticizing our tendencies to be complicit with the director’s manipulations and our passive absorption in narrative. But it is with his excellent 2000 film, The Piano Teacher, that these interrogations began to develop more maturely. Starring the exceptional actress, Isabelle Huppert, in a performance that makes any acting before it seem like amateur mimicry (I exaggerate, naturally) and based on the novel of Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher was a gripping and sadistic exploration of perversity, the idealist’s latent capacity for violence and the refusal of seduction.

Erica Kohut (Huppert) is a bitter, frigid piano teacher at a conservatory in Vienna, who still lives with her infantilizing tyrant mother (Annie Girardot). In her spare time, she attempts to escape the sterility of her life through sexual masochism – there is a particularly painful scene involving a razor – and an addiction to degrading pornography. Her life is suddenly destabilized by a peppy, talented student (Benoit Magimel) who, unaware of the extent of her perversity, falls in love with Kohut’s high-minded approach to music. However, Erica refuses to be seduced, and rather than yield to a romanticism she obviously craves, she self-destructively tests the limits of her love interest’s decency, painfully bringing out the brutal, disgusting barbarism behind his heroic persona. 

The film is an interesting choice to rent among friends. I have see it several times in theaters and on DVD, and reactions have ranged from vomiting to laughter (which, arguably, can both be reduced to attempts at distancing oneself from the film’s content) to enthusiasm and anger, but few disagree that Huppert’s performance will actively change your life.