Written by Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek (novel)
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Magimel
Language: French
Rating: 5/5
Based on Nobel Prize for Literature winner Elfriede Jelinek's novel, La Pianiste can be undoubtedly considered the best Haneke's movie (so far). Helped by the masterful Isabelle Huppert's interpretation, the Austrian director here perfectly portrayed the sexually and emotionally repressed piano teacher, who is the main character of this intimist drama.
Erika is in fact a cold, castigated woman in her forties who still lives with her mother - a controlling, asphyxiating figure who tries to take her daughter away from every kind of frivolousness and instead pushes her hard to succeed in her professional life. The relationship between the two women is unhealthy and based on unresolved issues that slowly consume them both. Moreover the cumbersome presence of her mother stops Erika from having normal, healthy intimate relationships, which she replaces with a long list of paraphilia: she enters a sex shop to watch porn and smell semen from the used tissues she finds in the video cabin; she walks a drive-in theater to stare at couples having sex; she self-inflicts genital injuries.
The only one who tries to shake Erika from her lonely, severe routine is Walter, a young engineering student and talented piano player who claims he falled in love with her. Erika, who initially rejects his exhausting avances, in the end will drag him in a world of humiliation and masochism the student can hardly understand. Powerful.
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