The Piano Teacher

I don't know if Michael Haneke's disturbing The Piano Teacher is a great work of art, but it is a great case study. Erika Kohut's wounds fill every frame of the film. Watching the film replicates the suffocating experience of bearing witness to the massive trauma of the embattled, perverse psyche. The film tests our ability to hold the polarities of pity for and revulsion toward Erika while maintaining connection to our feeling self. We are captive voyeurs watching an icy bombardment that never ends.

The sharp cuts during the opening credits are harbingers of the coming collision with Erika's fragmented psyche. We see hands without a body playing the piano, we hear the divine order of Bach suddenly truncated by silent, barely visible credits. We are startled in and out of the film's narrative, its sense of continuity shattered.

Erika is a murdered little soul, played to perfection by lovely Isa-belle Huppert. She is enshrouded in a veneer of loveliness. Her sensitivity to beautiful music, lofty sentiments, delicate body, and lilting voice build an accessible false self much like the feminine finery her hawkish mother shreds when Erika tries to smash her way toward an individuated life. “Time around Erika is slowly turning into a plaster cast,” wrote Elfriede Jelinek (Awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature) in her 1983 novel on which the film is based. Erika is trying to hatch (Mahler, 1968), but the tiny, pink, clitoral beak of a hatchling is not strong enough to break plaster. The little chick needs knives, razors, glass shards, an erect penis, a fist in her belly, a man as a human-oid battering ram to help her escape. Only Erika's mother, horrifying bordering on caricature in Annie Girardot's performance, punctures plaster with her cutting, blackmailing tears. Urethral sadism is the weapon of choice for both women, as seen in Erika's urinary orgasms. Male/female, mother/daughter, teacher/student, whole/part, self/other liquefy into urine, the more classically f