Isabelle Huppert in La Pianiste (2001)

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Bob Strauss of the Los Angeles Daily News offered the best one-sentence summary of the film:

"Anyone who's ever suffered under a martinet music instructor has no doubt fantasized about what an unhappy, repressed and twisted personal life their tormentor deserved. These people are really going to love The Piano Teacher."

But I think this quote from an IMDb reader is the sentence which tells you whether you will weigh in on the side of those who found it to be obsessive self-indulgent crap, or the side of those who found it to be a cinema masterpiece:

"La Pianiste is a film that cannot be appreciated without understanding cinema as an art form."

When I read that, I knew I was in trouble. Almost every time I see that a film requires an understanding of cinema as an art form, I know that I'm in for an arduous, pretentious, joyless experience. I have spent many long and weary hours watching such fare as Mother and Son, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Last Year at Marienbad, and have been forced to conclude that I have no understanding of cinema as an art form. I understand cinema as entertainment. I understand it as illumination. I understand it as instruction. And I understand it as a powerful tool to manipulate emotions for various purposes. But I have as much chance of understanding cinema as an art form as I would have of understanding a Farsi translation of Finnegan's Wake. I would have a better chance of understanding Chaos Theory or even Mime, for heaven's sake.

There is only one critical comment that can offer me greater assurance of an unpleasant experience - if the critic says the film is a tone-poem. Thank god that back in school I only had to study romantic and neo-classical and avant-garde poetry. If I had to take tone-poetry to graduate, I'd still be the world's oldest senior.

The French cultural institution known as Isabelle Huppert stars in the film, playing the aloof, spinsterly, condescending pillar of musical competence whose tight frown and severe exterior seem to indicate a virtual lack of happiness in her life. That turns out to be a fair indication, but a gifted young student decides to enter her life anyway, ignoring all the external signals because he senses that he has found the ultimate male fantasy - the prim exterior which masks a wild nature. He's right in some ways, but the wildness he finds is more than he bargains for. She's not repressing lust, but insanity (we find that her father is in an asylum for the same condition), and to come near her is to invite oneself into the deepest recesses of the libido.

Is there a joyless perversion to be imagined? Huppert is into it. She mutilates her genitals with a razor while she watches in the mirror. She makes sexual advances at her mother, not because she is interested, but to get revenge for something or another in the past. She goes to adult bookstores and stares disapprovingly at the young men who seek porn and anonymity. She watches hard-core porn. She walks around a drive-in, peeping in on couples making love.

The poor lad who enters this world thinks he is ready for it, but he is not. He seems supremely self-confident, and is a dead ringer for a young Wayne Gretzky, sexually and mentally mature beyond his years, but his sexuality is of a more typical strain. He wants a woman with joyful passion, not self-punishing lunacy. He wants to engage in sex for pleasure and emotional contact, not for pain or retribution or humiliation or empty longing.

When he attempts to make love to Huppert, she stops him, saying that she will send him a letter explaining exactly what he is to do. That particular missive would bring a blush to DeSade. He is to degrade her in sexual ways and to beat her unmercifully. She is a masochist, but he has no interest in being her designated sadist. Not only does he find her requests anhedonic and outré, but they don't even seem calculated to satisfy her arcane sexual tastes, a motivation which he might be able to live with. Instead, they seem calculated solely to humiliate Huppert's mother in some way. (The mother figures into the plan detailed in the letter.)

Huppert then engages the lad with a circular pattern of behavior in which she extends an invitation, warmth or flexibility, then goes frigid when he gets hooked in, possibly intending to provoke him into violence toward her. Then when he gets disgusted, she turns soft again until he is hooked once more. Repeat if necessary.

Hey, I'm glad it was this kid and not me.

I suppose this is one of the artiest films ever made about sex without pleasure. It is filled with classical musicians and their work, and takes place in a rarefied world of highly educated and talented people.

Unfortunately, the film comes from the turtle-neck school of literature and film, which believes roughly the following:

A pointless character study is unacceptable if it involves happiness, even if it is beautifully acted and directed.

BUT

If it portrays life as one unremitting scream of pain, it's genius, I tell you, sheer genius.

I guess the genre is arty sex films, or something equally French. If you have a picture of foreign-language films as aloof, pretentious, obsessive, humorless, and completely entertainment-free, this movie will not change your mind. C.

Nudity Report: One very brief nipple from Isabelle Huppert, plus an unrevealing side view of her crotch, and a shot of her crotch in semi-transparent lace panties.

Critics Vote: Ebert 3.5/4. The film won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes as well as several acting awards at Cannes and the Cesars. The British academy nominated it as "best foreign-language film," but it lost to Amores Perros.

IMDb Summary: IMDb voters score it 7.4/10.

Box Office: With their dollars: it grossed $1 million in the USA and Spain, and about $6 million in France. It bombed completely in a two-week appearance in the UK.

DVD Info: Widescreen letterboxed 1.85:1; Interview with Isabelle Huppert.


Written by: Scoopy …courtesy of Scoopy.net