Piano Teacher, The ( pianiste, La ) Movie Information

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Movie Information

Overall Rank: 1178

Average Rating: 3/4

# of Ratings: 48

Theatrical Release Date: 03/29/2002

Blu-ray/DVD Release Date: 09/26/2017

Language: French

Genre: Drama

MPAA Rating: R

Director: Michael Haneke

Actors: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoît Magimel, Susanne Lothar, Udo Samel, Anna Sigalevitch

Plot: Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory prestigious music school in Vienna. In her early forties and single, she lives with her overprotective and controlling mother in a hermetically sealed world of love-hate and dependency, where there is no room for men. Her sex life consists of voyeurism and masochistic self-injury. Lonely and alienated, Erika finds solace by visiting sex shops and experimenting with masochism. Ata a recital, she befriends Walter, a handsome young man, whom she seduces and with whom she begins an illicit affair. As Erika slowly drifts closer to the brink of emotional disorder, she uses the love-stricken Walter to explore her darkest sado-masochistic fantasies, which eventually lead to her undoing.
-- rachelle

SIngli6 - wrote on 04/13/2022

Perhaps Haneke's most exploitative film, The Piano Teacher functions more as a parable warning against the glorification of sadism and violence than as an actual rebuke of said glorification within its own form, as is the case with most of Haneke's other films. For a director consumed in his one-man crusade to cast a shadow of depressing introspection over cinema's love affair with violence, you can either find this a compromise of vision or a refreshing simplification of that vision made to appeal to an audience that might otherwise not see it. I find myself of the latter opinion.

Chris Kavan - wrote on 06/11/2012

Michael Haneke is always one to push the envelope and Piano Teacher is no different. Isabelle Huppert really gives a daring performance, even if her character makes all other "crazy" girlfriends look sane by comparison. This goes to some very dark places and I'm not sure I would want to visit them again.

Allison - wrote on 05/02/2008

I nearly stopped watching this. It isn't surprising that Michael Haneke's goal was to shock and disgust. However, now Ms. Huppert is my favorite living actress so it was worth it. The lady who wrote the novel Elfriede Jelinek won a Nobel Prize for her book, but I think it set feminism back 100 years.