The Piano Teacher (2001)
To say that Michael Haneke’s 2001 musical instalment is sinful, is almost laughably underwhelming. Instead, his frivolous exploration of various themes in the contemporary is a constant tug-of-war between sympathy and repellence for the audience. Much like Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, this is a film starring a female lead, and a conclusive discussion about power, control and god forbid, gender dynamics.
The truth is, Erika Kohut is a lot like a teenage girl living under the roof of her conservative household. Her overbearing mother and apparent lack of father figure make up her family, and while playing hide and seek with her mother, she is forced to dither between a little girl and a woman striving for sovereignty. Thus, her whole entire personality (or psychology) is the result of very questionable family influences that Freud would love to dig his scalpel in. The sequences really begin to take off after the arrogant young pianist Walter Klemmer makes his entrance and squirms his way into her private piano lessons.
The female lead is of course played by Isabelle Huppert, who is herself quite familiar with the doomed romance storyline having played the equivalent role in Claude Chabrol’s 1991 Madame Bovary, a resounding throwback to Gustave Flaubert’s original. The heroine in said film is greatly chagrined by the mundane realities of marriage, which causes her to seek that romance through adultery, and to fund her illicit escapades, she lands her entire family in extravagant debt. Unable to face the disaster she has created, Emma Bovary chugs a fatal dose of arsenic, leading to a truly horrifying way to die. In Elfriede Jelinek’s anti-Künstlerroman novel, Der Klavierspielerin, Huppert finds herself playing the riddled character from The Piano Teacher. With Haneke at the directorial helm, the film spills into an anti-melodrama, the elements embedded within Madame Bovary defiantly paradoxical. It is theatrical whilst somber, monstrous yet carefully bromidic.
While playing the piano accompaniment in her colleagues home for a rehearsal, the clichéd bond classical music has with the bourgeois is transitioned to a more quotidien lifestyle. Scubert’s Trio in E-Flat continues to reverberate, even as Erika wanders around a sex shop afterwards. Surely a woman who dabbles in the exquisiteness of Schubert’s lofty romance cannot sink to the slums of cheap pornography. No, she likes it hardcore within the privacy of a porn viewing booth. This is not the only instance where she does something that raises eyebrows. At home, she locks herself in her bathroom and mutilates her vagina with a razor blade. Back outside, she pees quietly next to a car with a couple having sex in it. In a rather politically incorrect way of saying, Erika Kohut is a weird character who has mixed sex with shame.
The Piano Teacher is all about contradictions — the confident woman she is outside and the scurrying mouse at home, the sophisticated virtuoso at the piano versus the sex weirdo hiding. Huppert’s portrayal is a masterful one, encapsulating all her different sides to give the audience the final conclusion about her character: Erika Kohut is a ticking time bomb strung together by her competing impulses. As strict and brilliant of a piano teacher she is at the Vienna Conservatory, her dexterous fingers dictating and her façade ever-present, her guard is shaken when the handsome Walter not only impresses pianistically, but also tempts her with the promise of love. Huppert herself is well acquainted with shoddy men proclaiming grand romantic gestures from her experience in Madame Bovary.
As for previous melodramas throughout film history, whether it be romantic or not, none of the passion is of the same wavelength as Erika’s sadomasochistic creativity. Walter plays the Prince Charming, but Erika is unwilling to cooperate and give him the happy ending. She seems to remember Emma Bovary’s brazen attitude and overt affaire du cœur, hence choosing to be cautious this time, however much she may pretend to be piqued by Walter’s spontaneity. Maybe something better understood by the classical community, Erika mentions Brahm’s schmaltz in an oxymoronic way, maintaining her bass against singing her melody. Try as hard as she might, Emma and Erika’s story come to an inflection point, with the former distraught by her extracurriculars’ rejections and the latter deciding to tempt fate.
Why are you sorry? Is it because you are a pig? Because your friends are pigs? Or because all women are bitches for making you a pig?
It is obvious that she does not know how to do romance. Erika probably cringed and walked out of The Notebook faster than she can play her piano trills. At the Conservatory, she has no problem whatsoever mocking her students; she has absolute control over their fingers. Perhaps it is because women are somehow the ones at fault for bringing out the worst in men, further fuelled by the fact that Erika is in a well-respected profession. Nobody really knows if there is a feminist theme to The Piano Teacher but it could explain why Erika is so vigilant against men especially. It must also be said that even if a truly good-natured man was to try and woo her, it would probably be the hardest thing ever. Hence, Walter’s challenge. Walter is practically immune to her frigid nature since he seems to radiate warmth and an infectious joie de vivre to those around him.
While Huppert should be much lauded for providing Erika’s contradictory behaviour nuance, Michael Haneke deserves credit for his understanding of her character. Erika’s somber statement that she is this emotionless machine while her bodily movements subtlety betray her. Haneke limits the amount of cuts in the film, opting for longer takes to show every possible detail to her character, which shows a woman who desires intimacy just as much as another woman. And in comes the biggest differences between Erika and Walter.
When films involve themselves with BDSM, they always paint this picture that the submissive is this sex slave that has absolutely no control whatsoever over their body. Think Fifty Shades of Grey that was released on Valentine’s Day. Critics claim that its rash perspective of erotica ruins the entire premise that that the submissive is actually the one with all the power, someone that dictates the terms and conditions. By some coincidence, BDSM is probably the best form of sex for Erika because she craves the control. Her mother has smothered her and it would be impossible to imagine Erika going out with her boyfriend and doing normal couple stuff. It feels overly harsh to blame her psychosis on just her family, but there is no other indicator present in the film to suggest otherwise.
Why Walter then? Emma/Huppert is a beautiful woman, so surely there must have been someone before to try their luck with her. Would it be so terrible to date someone more age-appropriate? Maybe it is just a European thing. In Walter, apart from his dashing good looks, he just might be one who would fulfill her sexual needs without question. Perhaps vanilla penis-vagina intercourse bores her. Her needs and wants are more colourful written on a piece of paper, just waiting for him to accept them. “Relationships are about compromise”, Cosmopolitan frequently says, but better yet, relationships are about control. Who gets more of it? People date because they are searching for something to fill a hole, then they get married and procreate. That is biology. As glamourized as BDSM can be in the pornos, Erika fails to understand that both sides must trust each other for this. Especially during BDSM.
Walter does not meet this criteria. He lambasts her upon reading her letter and highlights just how lowly he thinks of her. It is one thing to reject her proposition and walk away, but Walter emits such a disgusted affection for the woman he claims to like. Maybe Erika liked the negative reaction she got from him, since there is not much difference in sex and shame for her. Seeing the face Walter was wearing, it is evident that he unequivocally rejects her, so it definitely hurts. The very foundation of any romantic relationship is built from trust, one which neither party can do. The Erika from The Piano Teacher is a very particular person that most audiences probably will not relate to, but the idea of trust should not be that hard to empathize with. Within the carefully crafted parameters of her musical scoresheets, Erika has full control over everything, up until Walter throws her letter on the floor. He is not a stickler for rules, and neither is he able to look at her the same way he used to. So Erika has no choice but to get on her knees and beg him, completely losing her usual composure in order to get what she wants. She would do anything — love him despite her reluctance, even further in letting him rape her.
People do very extreme things in the name of love; Romeo and Juliet, Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Hadrian and Antinous, are all examples of couples putting utmost belief in their love, confident enough that it would brave anything to come. To keep the one we love around for longer, we are often inclined to make grand gestures, or at least forsake our own wishes and joy. After all, what could be better than making our significant other happy? However, everyday citizens are probably more level-headed, because they have dignity and more importantly, because they are capable of autonomous purposes. Erika’s daily life until Walter was mainly work, some rehearsals, then straight back home. She has absolutely no idea what love is. This is not to bash her per se, but when Erika stubbornly believes that Walter is still her soulmate, the audience cringes at how naive she is. From Walter’s arrogance, she infers it to be something they can overcome, something she can tame if she spreads her legs. Everything is alright if they are together.
And yet, The Piano Teacher prompts questions about the antagonist just as much as the protagonist. Walter Klemmer is the stereotypical playboy that girls swoon over, reminiscent of previous womanizers from Crazy, Stupid, Love or Casanova for example. Once again, it is not what he wants that is wrong. Like Erika, Walter probably does not understand love either. When given such sexual dominance, Walter distorts pain with pleasure. He does not understand that Erika wants to be the man in charge, which means that everything they do has to be consensual. He thinks a couple of stomps and spits would magically make her come. The two psyches feed off of each other, exasperating into a bad cocktail before the final act, with Erika mercilessly beaten and Walter fiendishly raping her body. This is not what she wants, but if that is what Walter wants, so be it.
There are stark differences between how the two define the notion of love; to Erika, we love another person through control, evidenced by her relationship with her mother. To Walter, love is when he can have a girl naked in front of him by grandiose flattery. Erika is now under a state of cognitive dissonance. Is the bruising supposed to be a sign of affection? Is this what she has always wanted? Any stranger to BDSM could tell that this is not BDSM, so why can she not? No matter how hard he beats her, Erika remains unable to differentiate abuse, sex and shame. What we see in porn or the simple sex fantasy every now and then is not always reality. It is exactly this contradiction that Erika endures, where the anti-melodrama of The Piano Teacher stamps its authority. Even when the film engages in the melodramatic, facing the tragedy that was attributed to Erika’s character, she is still unable to fulfill her role and unable to accept the repercussions from giving up control.
Ultimately, as the two characters, Erika Kohut and Emma Bovary, approach their final acts, their endings are similarly acidic. Emma’s suicide is reverberated, and Erika, so cavalierly dismissed by Walter. Left alone in the Conservatory’s foyer, eyes brimming with tears, she calmly takes out a knife from her purse. She stabs herself, the same blank face many of her students are used to, because she refuses to betray her heart. It is a lesson learned for her. She vows to reclaim her agency from the duplicitous man by hurting herself, an equally radical punishment to Walter’s abuse, cauterizing the internal with this time, an external wound.
The film stays largely loyal to Jelinek’s narrative. Erika’s final act of defiance is passionless and even monotone. Pathos itself is not communicated to the protagonist or audience by sheer theater. Drama for the sake of drama is not drama. Drama in the now, is often the anti-climactic realization. Erika nonchalantly covers her wound and exits the scene. She cares naught for her performance. Cars go by in front of the Conservatory and the night draws closer.
Quite poetically quoted from Jelinek, “The world, unwounded, does not stand still.”
