You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This film, with a French, German and Austrian cast, and released simultaneously in French as La pianiste and in German as Die Klavierspielerin, is a viscerally clenching and dark cinematic portrayal of enmeshment, repression, sadism, masochism and destruction. The tight and conflicted characterization of Professor Erika Kohut, the piano teacher, portrayed by Isabelle Huppert, reveals a dark labyrinth of mother-daughter bonds and bondage. The tension of the film's dramatic narrative, augmented by a soaring romantic musical score, dramatizes the excruciating strangulation of creative jouissance and vitality that perversion can foster. The film portrays a life in which the exquisite humanism of the music she plays and teaches cannot ultimately save her tormented soul.
In this review, I will focus on how the film may be viewed from a relational psychoanalytic perspective, as an elaboration of the relationship between the early mother-child bond and sado-masochistic defenses. In this text, we see a pathological, hostile-dependent relationship between mother and child played out sado-masochistically in the construction of perverse sexuality in the daughter. I also consider how pianist daughter Erika Kohut's behavior can be understood in terms of her reactions to overstimulation of the primal scene as well as a desperate, unsuccessful attempt at separating herself from an intrusive mother's use of her as a narcissistic object. In her defensive identification with the male who has the power to possess and dominate the mother sexually, her perversion expresses itself as a need for control over the penis or, in Lacanian terms, the phallus.
Another psychoanalytic issue related to the theme of mother-daughter bond or bondage is the piano teacher's possessive envy and competitiveness especially with men, with all potential rivals for her mother's love and attention, and for her lover's attention, and in piano playing, especially Schubert. Finally, in spite of all of Erika Kohut's