Michael Haneke
La Pianista

Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. At a superficial glance, she could be seen as a normal woman leading a mediocre life, like all normal people. She shares a small apartment with her mother, the umbilical cord still perfectly intact. The elderly woman insists on controlling her daughter every single moment of the day. Erika is the best creature to ever set foot on Earth, a woman of admirable musical abilities, destined to emerge, to be a great pianist. Due to this imperative, Erika's mother prevented her from experiencing her own childhood and youth, and now Erika is forty, not a world-renowned pianist but an ordinary teacher, and not even that much. At night, before retreating under the warmth of the sheet she shares (Even that!) with her mother, Erika immerses herself in the world of peep shows, becoming a sordid voyeur for couples bustling in hurried orgasms. This is what constitutes her life. Art, which others will never understand, her mother, whom she can never do without, the perversions that, along with self-inflicted bodily harm, allow her to feel alive. Can a young student like Walter Klemmer disrupt this balance?

Presented at the 54th Cannes Film Festival, "The Piano Teacher”, the eighth feature film by Austrian Michael Haneke, garnered great critical attention. Grand Jury Special Prize, Best Actress (the immense Isabelle Huppert who competes with a mature Anne Girardot as the tyrannical mother), Best Actor (Benoit Magimel, unknown to most, a sort of French Accorsi), in short, a triumph. However, unlike "Funny Games”, the director's masterpiece that still hasn't lost its luster, "The Piano Teacher” now passes as a fine example of a cult director's work and has gradually slipped into the terrifying depths of independent cinema, which those in the "movies-must-make-me-laugh" camp would call "heavy." The discussion is slightly more complex, and it would be appropriate to take as a starting point the novel on which it is based.

It is rare for a film based on a novel to avoid the possibility of comparison. "The Piano Teacher”, like many others before and after, does not succeed. It was 1983 when Elfriede Jelinek (Nobel Prize for Literature 2004) published the eponymous novel, a story that caused a stir and gained some resonance in Italy because it was perceived as a sort of pornographic novel. But let's think about the protagonist, Erika. In the novel, which unlike the film can delve into a series of excursions related to the woman's youth, Erika is more than a tangle of opposing feelings compressed in a slender figure. Her relationship with her mother is akin to that of a victim and her tormentor, an effect of "Stockholm syndrome”: the victim suffers pain from the tormentor, tries to break free from their lethal embrace but when she succeeds, she returns, tormented by remorse. Jelinek's Erika expresses a discomfort that goes far beyond the individual dimension and becomes an instrument for the author's civil and social critique. Through the protagonist and her misadventures, she lashes out at Vienna and its myths, chiefly that of classical music, affirming that "in Vienna nothing will assert itself unless it has already asserted itself elsewhere,” dismantling the mechanisms of the pornography industry to reveal their stark vacuity. In all this, Klemmer serves as the novelty element that insinuates itself into an old relationship that, in line with the author's intentions, fails to divide.

The film takes a slightly different path. Haneke crafts the subject by discarding every aspect that does not remain on an exclusively introspective level, and the film becomes the story of a neurosis. Because of this, the mother-daughter relationship shatters, the daughter's dictatorial attitudes are seen as the primary cause of Erika's discomfort which, however, in the novel, are fully shared by her, as already mentioned. Of this tormented relationship of this unnatural couple, where mother and daughter merge into one, there is no longer a trace in the film and the sole figure of Erika stands out, masterfully portrayed by Huppert. The film retains the dark tones inspired by the typically Viennese atmosphere, with its ancient and majestic elegance contrasted by the abrupt transition to the sordid venues frequented by the teacher. The character of Klemmer also remains, defined in opposition to Erika’s. Bright, intelligent and, let's face it, a bit naive, capable of seeing the liaison with Erika only in terms of the teacher-student stereotype. But Haneke, like any director worthy of the title, puts his own unique touch (in this case unmistakable). He does not let the more macabre and sensual aspects overflow, which he frames in a much more articulated structure, revisiting a theme dear to him (as seen in the aforementioned "Funny Games”), which is the opposition between external balance and internal disorder, the cleanliness of the face and the filth of the innards, and ensures that the audience does not detest even for a moment the protagonist, who is terribly voracious for life, tenderly stumbling over her own steps.