Erotic horrors.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher
• Position: Reel World - The Piano Teacher

PETER HANEKE'S "The Piano Teacher" is a film that you won't see in your local multiplex, for reasons that have little to do with mass culture's protection of public morality. "The Piano Teacher" is a controversial, adult picture to be sure, but its content is not as offensive, to my way of thinking, as any number of vacuous, inhumane movies that rake in box office millions and receive the usual kudos from journalistic hacks. This masterpiece will appear in a few art houses, then perhaps one day on home video, though two of Haneke's earlier efforts, "The Seventh Continent" and "Benny's Video," are not available on video and received very limited screening in the U.S. A basic issue is the lack of any real venue in our multiplex, play-to-the-lowest-common-denominator culture for most foreign or independent movies. (Keep in mind that what many think of as "independent" films are, in fact, low-budget studio products.)

A much-more-profound problem resides in the uncompromising status of "The Piano Teacher" (its real title is "La Pianiste," suggesting that the main character is an accomplished artist as well as a teacher) as a work not attempting to construct the audience as a bunch of puerile adolescents, approaching adult topics with an adult, educated sensibility. The film deals with Erica (Isabelle Huppert in a masterful performance), a middle-aged piano instructor who lives alone with her aging, widowed mother. The two have a miserable, codependent relationship full of violent physical and emotional abuse, Erica reduced to both caretaker and overgrown infant. (She shares a bed with her mother.) Erica is the walking embodiment of repression, her life consisting solely of her virtuoso piano recitals and her mean-spirited, often outright-cruel piano lessons given her young acolytes. Her sex life consists of visits to hard-core porn shops, voyeurism, and self-mutilation. She encounters Walter, a gifted young student of classical music who becomes enamored with her. After Walter's adolescent, impetuous advances bordering on rape, Erica informs him of her masochistic needs via a long, convoluted letter that he reads with snide contempt. Erica, addressing both the boy and the audience, asks, "Do I disgust you?" Suffice it to say the relationship ends in disaster and paves the way for a shattering conclusion.

"The Piano Teacher" is extraordinary for its discussion, in our supposedly "liberal" era of endless talk shows with their sexual...