The Piano Teacher (La pianiste)

THE PIANO TEACHER (La pianiste)                      A-                   

Austria  France  Germany  (131 mi)  2001  d:  Michael Haneke

I have no feelings, get that into your head.  If I ever do, they won’t defeat my intelligence. 

—Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert)

Winner of the 2nd Place Grand Prix at Cannes, Haneke’s only adapted feature, a bizarre and shockingly grotesque study of female sexuality, the dynamics of control, and losing one’s equilibrium to irrepressible forces, the film explores aspects of degradation culture, or rape culture, evolving into punitive scenes of pain and alienation, viewed from a woman’s perspective, though guided by an unmistakable male hand of a director synonymous with a cinema of cruelty, adapted from a controversial 1983 novel by Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian playwright and novelist who was writing a rebuke to rising Nazi influence within the current Austrian government, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, referring to her country as a “criminal nation” in her acceptance speech, though one scandalized member of the selection panel resigned over the decision, accusing the author of “whining, unenjoyable, public pornography.”  Though perhaps more obscure, this film serves as a predecessor to Haneke’s later work, THE WHITE RIBBON (2009), in showing a direct link to what would ultimately become the Nazi Third Reich, becoming a scathing critique of intellectual high-mindedness and nationalist snobbery, where culture is appropriated in the name of tyrants and political repression.  While shot in Vienna, the cast speaks entirely in French, which in itself feels like a subversive turn of events.  Isabelle Huppert turned Haneke down for Funny Games (1997), thinking it was too brutal, but she is a revelation in this film, among her greatest performances, winner of Best Actress at Cannes by unanimous consensus.  In Haneke films, there is always a malevolent force present in a comfortable bourgeois setting, and that is indisputably the case here.  As Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), she plays a middle-aged piano professor at the Vienna conservatory who in her 40’s still lives with her domineering and abusive mother (Annie Girardot), an overly critical stage mother who sees her daughter as her own personal possession, controlling her every move, viewed as a failure in her eyes in that her career is not as a performing artist, settling for something less.  In the opening scene they not only argue but fight, with her hovering mother unhappy with her behavior, questioning her fashion choices, occasionally throwing items out of her closet, even ripping them to shreds, as she does here, but then the two of them sleep in the same tiny bedroom together, literally just a few inches from one another in a claustrophobically codependent relationship, reminiscent of the self-imposed claustrophobia of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), where her home becomes her prison.  Erika inevitably apologizes in a bizarre choreography of kisses and slaps, but this unhealthy relationship spreads its seeds of contamination throughout the rest of the film.  As a piano instructor, Erika is overly stern and sadistic to the point of being bullying and self-righteous, ruling over her own dominion with piercing personal barbs that draw blood, literally ripping her students to shreds, often leaving them whimpering in tears, never dwelling on the consequences, while she shows no concern whatsoever for their broken spirits.  She is the master, while they are the student, and her domineering manner rules by intimidation.  While it may seem odd that this abusive dynamic would inhabit discussions about playing Schubert and Beethoven, but Erika’s haughty arrogance knows no bounds, believing she is intimately connected to both Schubert and Schumann, as if she knew them personally, where her expertise is renowned.  Due to her harsh and exacting style, students are willing to be belittled by her, perhaps even destroyed, as she is a heralded artist with an impeccable reputation.  Severely repressed, however, beyond our wildest imaginations, viewers have no idea what’s in store for them. 

One of the biggest pleasures of the film is how Haneke uses the musical selections, a trained classical pianist himself whose career never materialized, where his mastery is best expressed in the first half, given the most excruciatingly personal musical context, filled with classical piano segues, which are as artistically sublime as anything he’s ever done, suggesting Vienna is the capital of classical music, viewed as the extreme height of European cultural traditions, as opposed to the “lower” forms of rock or pop, yet the music can be used as an instrument of repression, where an anti-humanist vein of contempt takes over in the latter stages, shown in graphic detail, unafraid of the disgust in might generate.  Brilliantly bridging the music’s text to the themes of the film, one particular scene opens up the entire film.  Erika is performing an ensemble piece, playing piano with a cellist and violinist, the slow Andante movement from Schubert’s Piano Trio # 2, the exact same music that Kubrick featured in BARRY LYNDON (1975), Schubert / Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major, D. 929: 2nd mvt - YouTube (3:07), distinctly mesmerizing and haunting, unquestionably powerful in Kubrick’s hands, which triggers our imaginations when we hear it.  In a context that is all so high brow and austere, she is briefly scolded by the cellist for not paying strict attention, so they start again to play, but à la Kubrick, the music continues on into the next scene where she is walking through a crowded shopping mall totally oblivious to the world around her, just the opposite of the heightened sensitized listening mode needed to play a Schubert Trio, which is exquisitely classical in structure, supremely crafted, instead she is lost in her own world, bumping into people, completely awkward and out of control, just like a regular geek.  All this is well and good, but then we see she has entered a porn shop (in an upscale mall, mind you!), the only woman in the shop, where the male customers are obviously perturbed, while this luscious music continues to play and all around her she is surrounded by porn magazines featuring shaved pussies, endowed breasts with clamps and chains attached to the nipples, until it leads to her own private viewing room, where her sexual appetite extends into extreme masochistic fantasies, including a prim and proper lady smelling the used Kleenex from the prior male occupant inside the sex booth.  Impossible not to guffaw out loud at this moment, as it’s amazing how funny and yet how perfectly constructed this scene is, as it totally changes the entire structure of the film, adding a theatrically entertaining human element to an otherwise dour and austere film.   

Huppert reaches unparalleled territory here, with Haneke shooting her in two distinctly different kinds of spaces, open-windowed practice rooms or elegant, high-ceilinged conservatory settings featuring plenty of open air, but also the cramped, constricted quarters of bathrooms or peep shows, where she’s used to rubbing elbows with complete strangers.  Haneke makes exquisite use of the Franz Schubert Song Cycle Die Winterreise D 911, as the artist was dying of syphilis when it was composed, a piece that aches of solitary loneliness and heartache, using portions of the seventeenth and eighteenth songs in a 24-song cycle, describing a lone traveler traversing an icy landscape reflecting upon his own restlessness and solitude, clearly a reflection of Erika’s own alienation.  She speaks the carefully chosen words of a song in a lesson with one of her more anxiety-ridden students, Anna Schober (Anna Sigalevitch), though the first time we hear the lyrics sung is when Erika is still in the porn shop, smelling the used Kleenex, as Schubert becomes the bridge to the next scene, with the traveler passing through a sleeping wintry village, “The dogs are barking, their chains are rattling; the men are asleep in their beds,” from “Im Dorfe (In the Village)” Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Gerald Moore - Winterreise, Op ... - YouTube (3:02), suggesting the dogs should drive the weary traveler away, as he doesn’t even deserve rest.  “I am done with all dreaming.  Why should I linger among the sleepers?”  This is followed by “Der Stürmische Morgen (A Stormy Morning),” which sounds like an ominous omen, “How the storm has torn apart the gray mantle of the sky,” Schubert: Winterreise, D.911 - 18. Der stürmische Morgen - YouTube (58 seconds), perhaps a fortuitous warning of the tempests that lie ahead, suggesting the turbulence may drive all the pain and anguish away.  When Erika gives a private concert in the home of a wealthy patron, she meets Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel, who was also awarded Best Actor at Cannes), an engineer student who plays piano as a hobby, but his use of Schubert, in particular his Piano Sonata in A Major, is a direct pathway to Erika’s heart, where his playing couldn’t be more boldly ostentatious, like a peacock fluttering its tail, using the virility of his piano playing as a sign of his sexy flirtatiousness, The Piano Teacher - Schubert isn't a walk in the park - YouTube (4:59).  While she pretends not to notice, she is deeply affected, stirred in unimaginable ways, yet she keeps it all concealed behind the haughty arrogance of professorial language. 

Easily one of the more telling scenes takes place at home, where she finds a hidden razor blade, straddling the bathtub with one leg, using a small mirror as she mutilates her genitals, recalling Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972), though with a substantially different tone, blood dripping down the bathtub, when her mother yells out “Dinner’s ready.” “I’m coming,” she replies.  This kind of mordant humor comments on her sense of normalcy, as it’s not at all normal, yet she goes through the pretensions of a daily routine.  Clearly one of the intentions of the film is to suggest people with so-called “normal” characteristics (such as Erika’s mother or Walter) are capable of inflicting far more brutality and ugliness than someone suffering from twisted and depraved sexual fantasies.  Walter literally interrupts that routine, insisting upon taking her class, and passes through all the tryouts, yet in his very first class, he immediately pledges his undying love before playing a single note for her.  But his conception of love and hers are from different universes, intersecting in a blitzkrieg of violence.  Her sense of order is invaded by this overly aggressive student, who uses music as a sexually suggestive flirtatious advance, literally cornering the object of his desires.  Her retort is to remind this student that Schubert thought of himself as ugly, a social outcast, where his cruel rejection plays into the utterly enthralling music he produced, perhaps equating a diseased Schubert with her own depraved sexual desires, including her preference for hardcore pornography.  While the two pursue a mysterious game of sexual desire and humiliation that delves deeper into her own sado/masochistic mindset, her cruelty is exposed, intentionally maiming one of her students, a vengeful act that is unspeakably wicked, then blaming someone else.  It’s clear she hasn’t a care in the world for her students, but becomes lost in a labyrinth of dark desires that only become more and more grotesque and disturbing.  While Haneke’s direction is formally precise, it’s questionable whether the bizarre turn in the relationship actually elevates any drama or tension, accentuating the brutish male element as reaching obscene heights, while Huppert’s distillation of a very female sort of pain may be more in tune with a self-loathing feminist perspective than Haneke.  In this film, the repulsive Benny's Video (1992) becomes a symbol of erotica.  What this has to say about the human condition remains obscure, though abuse begets abuse, especially when tolerated as an everyday ordinary occurrence, until a neverending cycle of abuse becomes an unstoppable destructive force, especially when it becomes the accepted and conventional practice by police, military units, or governmental rule, drawing implications from an historical Austrian connection to the Nazis that still has a damaging influence, where the centerpiece of European culture is taken down a notch by cruel and insidious forces within suggesting a normalcy far uglier than any shameful sexual affliction.   

An Angel at My Table

Janet Frame alongside the three different actresses that play her, (l-r) Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, and Kerry Fox

AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE – made for TV               A                

Australia  New Zealand  Great Britain  USA  (157 mi)  1990  d:  Jane Campion

Prospero:

My brave spirit! 

Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil

Would not infect his reason?

Ariel: 

Not a soul

But felt the fever of the mad and play'd

Some tricks of desperation.  

—Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1 Scene 2, 1611  The Tempest - Page 397 - Google Books Result

Originally made as a three-part television series, Campion was initially reluctant to let it be released theatrically, eventually winning a handful of awards (seven) at the Venice Film Festival in 1990, yet this is one of the better biopic cinematic experiences, told in three parts, covering all three in a trilogy of autobiographical volumes by New Zealand writer Janet Frame, To the Is-land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985), and a film that defiantly probes underneath the surface of the lead female character.  Given a more modernistic context in that the film, a collection of various fragments in her life, leads to a wholistic overall view, as the life of Janet Frame literally materializes before our eyes, filled with literary passages and extraordinarily subjective insight, where the film is a profoundly revelatory work that expresses something close to the depths of the writer’s soul.  Reminiscent of an earlier portrayal of Hollywood actress Frances Farmer in Jessica Lange’s brilliant portrayal in FRANCES (1982), both women spent years confined to institutions for perceived mental health issues with a condition that was believed to be incurable, subject to electric shock treatments and targeted for a recommended lobotomy, which, viewed in historical hindsight, is one of the cruelest and most destructive medical procedures mankind ever invented, yet both of these women came frightfully close to having the procedure.  It was her intimacy of the psychological terrors inflicted on patients during extensive hospital treatment that led the young artist to examine her life so closely, finding language for the darkest recesses of her imagination, exposing what amounts to hidden secrets to the world through an obsession with the healing power of literature.  Arguably New Zealand’s most distinguished author, Campion, a fellow New Zealander, fills the screen with indelible images of her own homeland while scrutinizing Frame’s life with methodical precision.  With a screenplay by Laura Jones, who also wrote the adaptation of the Henry James novel in Campion’s later film with Nicole Kidman in THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996), this film also has one of the best uses of music by Don McGlashan which couldn’t be more perfectly integrated throughout, creating a fragile, sensory experience that is unique to films.  But first and foremost is the character of Janet Frame, played by three different actresses, Karen Fergusson as a child, Alexia Keogh as an adolescent, and Kerry Fox as an adult, where Fox, so brilliant in Patrice Chéreau’s INTIMACY (2001), offers the performance of her career in her very first role, yet another unique discovery by Campion, criminally overlooked by the Academy Awards, as she was not even nominated, yet unlike the character of Sweetie (1989), whose fierce individuality may have been too toxic for some, Frame’s vulnerability invites the audience in, allowing us to feel her social anxiety, hiding recognizable fears and anxieties with an uncomfortable smile, caught out of sorts, like a deer in the headlights, almost entirely with looks and gestures, barely uttering a word, as she suffers from extreme sensitivity and acute shyness, offering an inner narration as a window to her soul where she becomes socially isolated at college, “Too shy to mix, too scared to enter the Union building, I was more and more alone, and my only romance was in poetry and literature.”

The author of twelve novels, three short story collections, one children’s book, two books of poetry (one published posthumously), and three volumes of autobiography, Frame grew up in the South Island of New Zealand in dire poverty, the second daughter in a family of four girls and a boy, where her father was a railroad engineer, and though he kept his job during the depression years of the 1930’s, the family had little money to spare.  In the opening moments viewers are introduced to a young girl with an explosion of red/orange hair, like the Little Orphan Annie comic strip character, where it feels like a satiric reference to Campion’s first film short, AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE — PEEL (1982), where all three characters have bright red hair, yet there are none of the skewed angles and experimental shots on display here, instead it’s shot by Stuart Dryburgh in a much more conventional manner, featuring remarkable landscapes, where humans are dwarfed by green fields and the grandiosity of the land, made to resemble smaller creatures.  Deprived of material possessions, there are many family songs in Janet’s childhood that recur later in the film as familiar musical motifs, such as “Duncan Gray,” a Scottish folk song heard throughout, an angel at my table YouTube (31 seconds), yet they play a role early on in contributing to family unity, as Janet seems content with her warm and loving family.  Perhaps starved for friendship, she steals money to treat her classmates to gum, yet ends up being branded a thief, made to stand in front of the blackboard with her back to the class in utter humiliation, which becomes a personal catastrophe, especially when she’s separated from the rest of the class and placed with several obviously disabled kids.  Scorned and humiliated, perhaps this is a hint of what’s to come.  With four sisters to a single bed, seen amusingly practicing shifting together, all turning simultaneously, Janet has a close relationship with her sisters, reading vociferously, comparing her family to the Brontë sisters, while her brother developed epileptic seizures and was regularly beaten by her father.  Meeting a friend outside the family was a revelation, a neighbor girl named Poppy, where the two playfully re-enacted various abuses they witnessed, violent fathers and puritanically strict teachers, An Angel at my table YouTube (4:02), yet the curious way the children are filmed feels almost magical, holding our spellbound interest with intoxicating musical selections, yet perhaps their closeness aroused fear in their parents, as Janet’s father forbid them from seeing one another again.  Often framed in long walks down a lonely highway or through sheep-ridden acres of farmland, her awkwardness increased during puberty, becoming embarrassed by her unruly red hair and her decayed teeth.  Things only got worse when her eldest sister Myrtle drowned in a local swimming pool, an event that was preceded by happy events, as the family took photographs on a family holiday, yet when looking at them afterwards, the view of Myrtle was blurred, where she is strangely missing from view, like an ominous omen announcing her fate. 

But it wasn’t until Janet went off to college at the University of Dunedin, studying to be a teacher, that she found it painfully shy to interact with the other girls, afraid to enter the student common room, instead taking refuge in spending her time alone in her room, immersing herself in a world of imagination and literature in order to escape from reality, writing poems and short stories, many of which were published in school publications.  Her sister Isabel joined her at school, yet they were eventually forced to separate, leading to an existential moment, “So this is how it was, face to face with the future, living apart from Isabel, pretending that I was not alone, and that teaching is what I’d longed to do all my life.”  Astoundingly, her sister Isabel drowned shortly thereafter, creating yet another inexplicable personal loss.  When the day arrived that she should finally stand before a group of young students as their teacher, with an administrator observing from the back of the classroom, she froze, once again standing with her back to the class, mirroring a childhood incident, where the camera’s focus is suddenly on the piece of chalk in her hand, as if time has stopped, yet the class becomes restless and uneasy, where she’s forced to excuse herself, leading to the most wondrous scene of the film, where the exquisite music of Kathleen Ferrier sings Schubert’s “An die Musik” an angel at my table  YouTube (3:38), her favorite composer, as Janet runs away with tears streaming down her face, unable to contain herself, finding herself suddenly outside where she is filled with desperation and anxiety, having what amounts to a nervous breakdown, yet the transcendent voice of Ferrier, so quietly dramatic, registering such clarity, unmatched tonal richness, and emotional warmth, holds the screen.  Frame’s interior world was collapsing, “I felt completely isolated.  I knew no one to confide in, to get advice from; and there was nowhere I could go.  What, in all the world, could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated.”  It was her writing talent, however, that brought special attention to her personal life, as she acknowledges in one paper swallowing a handful of pills in what was probably a suicide attempt.  It was this autobiographical observation that led one of her college professors to refer her for further psychiatric examinations where it’s revealed that she’s schizophrenic, perhaps the singlemost significant event in her life, as she spent the next eight years drowning in the as yet untold atrocities of the New Zealand mental institutions, including the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum.  What follows is an immersion into personal nightmares and horrors, as she’s thrown in with more seriously disturbed patients with little to no education, who literally can’t control themselves, where patients were beaten for bedwetting, who scream and cry out all hours of the day and night, yet she’s dumped into their presence for what was described as “a period of rest.”  Viewers immediately recognize the shocking indignity of suddenly descending into barbaric conditions, yet she was forced to receive more than 200 electric shock treatments, “each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution.”  One of the more ghoulish scenes of the film is a strange dance party taking place in the asylum, an unsettling moment that couldn’t feel more twisted.   

Recalling in her autobiography, An Angel at My Table, An Angel at My Table: The Complete Autobiography:

The attitude of those in charge, who unfortunately wrote the reports and influenced the treatment, was that of reprimand and punishment, with certain forms of medical treatment being threatened as punishment for failure to ‘co-operate’ and where ‘not co-operate’ might mean a refusal to obey an order, say, to go to the doorless lavatories with six others and urinate in public while suffering verbal abuse by the nurse for being unwilling. ‘Too fussy are we?  Well, Miss Educated, you’ll learn a thing or two here.

After eight years, with no signs of improvement, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy, as even her mother was persuaded to sign the permission documents, as we see a group of patients wearing head wraps, presumably those that survived the operation, with orderlies helping them walk the grounds, but she was only spared the operation at the last minute when her doctor happened to read in the newspaper that she won a national prize, the Hubert Church Memorial Award, for her book of short stories, The Lagoon and Other Stories.  Astonishingly, at the age of 29, Frame emerged from this episode with her sanity intact, writing “It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life.”  With the help of Frank Sargeson (Martyn Sanderson), a gay New Zealand writer of some repute and notoriety, he invited Frame to come live in a trailer on his grounds, allowing her to write in solitude, where she immediately set to work on Owls Do Cry, her first published novel in 1957, which surprised them both by being immediately published.  Receiving a grant for her artistic work, she travels to London and Spain as a published author, yet her humility is at the heart of her appeal, described by Campion as “an unremarkable heroine who allowed people to experience their own vulnerability.”  Through various travails, her reservation gets lost in the mail and she loses her luggage, among other things, yet she remains isolated, spending much of her time in her room, where the tone shifts from absurd comedy, especially in the form of Patrick (David Letch), a bigoted Irish tenant who tries to school her on the ways of the world, repeatedly asking if she’s “fancy-free,” still a virgin, thinking he’s being romantically protective, to the strangeness of the Spanish women who are forever scrubbing the floors and cleaning their building, surrounded by religious icons, while spreading gossip about this hopelessly “fallen” woman, to the inhibitions of free-wheeling 50’s tourists traveling through Europe, where she discovers her first love affair with an American history professor, taking a break from writing, where her passions are beautifully expressed by swimming nude in the open sea, but alas, he must return to America for the fall term once summer is over.  While the film accentuates the romantic backdrop of a small, Spanish coastal town, it also addresses her very real fears when she’s left pregnant and alone, without the man ever knowing, where in an excruciatingly sad scene she loses the baby, adding a female dimension on the summer holiday that most films never explore.  Elevated feelings of anxiety lead to a voluntary hospitalization in London, where she’s surprised to learn, “Finally it was discovered that I never suffered from schizophrenia.  At first the truth seemed more terrifying than the lie.  How could I now ask for help when there was nothing wrong with me?”  What she was experiencing was the residual effects from the many years of electric shock treatments, as it takes years for the body to calm down afterwards.  This stunning revelation of an earlier misdiagnosis seems to clear an open path for the rest of her life, where she was content to simply write.  By the end of the film, she’s a notorious artist that the press wants to photograph and write stories about, a local celebrity when she returns to her hometown, and for a very brief moment, even dances the twist, An Angel At My Table End YouTube (2:14).  It should be pointed out that Kerry Fox is simply phenomenal, onscreen for nearly every shot in the second half of the film, showing an emotional range that is quite simply breathtaking, where certainly part of Campion’s unique gift comes in her remarkable talent for casting.  Sensitive and deeply moving, with only spare use of dialogue, this is a uniquely inventive character study that doubles as a living novel that develops before our eyes, something of a delight all the way through, where the uncredited music of a Schubert sonata, Alfred Brendel Schubert - Piano Sonata in B Flat Major, D. 960 Second Movement ... YouTube (9:38), plays throughout, heightening the gravity, as does that original folk theme played at the outset, An Angel At My Table (OST) by Don McGlashan on Spotify, adding a solemn grace to the outstanding artistry onscreen.