The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)

Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, and Benoît Magimel in The Piano Teacher

Erika Kohut: Isabelle Huppert
Mother: Annie Girardot
Walter Klemmer: Benoît Magimel
Anna Schober: Anna Sigalevitch
Mrs. Schober: Susanne Lothar
George Blonskij: Udo Samel
Gerda Blonskij: Cornelia Köndgen

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke '
Based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek
Cinematography: Christian Berger

Michael Haneke's cinema of cruelty reaches its apex (some would say nadir) in The Piano Teacher, which becomes an almost definitive vehicle for Isabelle Huppert's ability to create terrifying women. In that regard her performance surpasses even the murderously manipulative Jeanne in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie (1995). The Piano Teacher's Erika Kohut calls to mind the masochistic Michèle Leblanc in Paul Verhoeven's Elle (2016), which earned Huppert the Oscar nomination that should have gone to her for those earlier films. The Piano Teacher resembles Elle in that both Erika and Michèle are masochists, the product of horribly dysfunctional families: Michèle's father was a mass murderer, Erika's died in a mental institution. But Erika is the more intricately fascinating character because she is devoted to the beauty of her art, releasing her pent-up sexuality in private acts of self-mutilation, watching pornography, and voyeurism -- there are drive-in movie theaters in Vienna? who knew? -- whereas Michèle has channeled hers into creating video games full of violent images. It's the disconnect between the beauty of Schubert and Schumann and Bach that fills the film's soundtrack and the ugliness of Erika's desire for self-degradation that gives Haneke's film its essential tension. To be sure, she takes out her frustrations on her students, cruelly mocking them in her attempts to make them live up to her musical ideals, but it's only when she finds a man who can challenge her own desire to dominate that she approaches fulfillment. Walter Klemmer is younger than she; he's handsome and athletic and smart, and he has the kind of musical talent that potentially matches her own. The masochist thinks she has met her potentially equal sadist. It's in her attempts to convert Walter's otherwise conventional sexuality into something as dark and damaged as her own that she encounters her limits, becoming the failure that her horrendous harpy of a mother has continually called her. None of this is a lot of fun: The Piano Teacher is one of the least erotic films about sex ever made. Haneke has jettisoned the backstories of Erika and her mother that were apparently supplied in Elfriede Jelinek's novel (which I haven't read), leaving us to speculate on how mother and daught wound up in a relationship in which they are slapping and yelling at each other one moment, then cuddling in a shared bed the next. But Haneke is not an explainer; he's content to show, not tell. And that often gives his films a visceral quality that makes them as fascinating and provocative of thought as they are unpleasant.  

The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Ulrich Mühe in The Castle

K.: Ulrich Mühe
Frieda: Susanne Lothar
Artur: Frank Giering
Jeremias: Felix Eitner
Barnabas: André Eisermann
Olga: Dörte Lyssewski
Amalia: Inga Busch
Erlanger: Hans Diehl
Pepi: Birgit Linauer
Narrator: Udo Samel

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Based on a novel by Franz Kafka
Cinematography: Jirí Stibr
Production design: Christoph Kanter

There's an odd resonance between Ulrich Mühe's frustrated K. in The Castle and the role for which he's best known in America, the anonymously gray Stasi spy Gerd Wiesler in The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006). Both are trapped in systems not of their making and are given tedious tasks that ultimately prove meaningless: K. to serve as a land surveyor in a village that doesn't want one and is so covered with blowing snow that there's hardly any land to survey, Wiesler to listen in on and try to trap a playwright whose crimes against the state are, if they exist, minimal. Both try to make the best of impossible situations, K. by doggedly persisting in his attempts to communicate with the unseen and unapproachable Castle, Wiesler by doing his job dutifully until its absurdity becomes intolerable. Absurdity is, to be sure, what Franz Kafka's unfinished novel is all about: People in it behave absurdly -- even the protagonist who, in a particularly dreamlike moment, finds himself hiding under a counter with the mistress of the man he wants to meet and having sex with her. Even the people who might help him, like his goofy assistants Artur and Jeremias or the eager emissary from the Castle, Barnabas, only lead him into further frustrations. Michael Haneke has followed the novel's plot faithfully, even to the extent of leaving off in mid-sentence at the point where the dying Kafka abandoned the manuscript. The result is a film both provocative and tedious: There's a scene near the end in which K. is struggling to stay awake, and I found myself fighting slumber, too. But the commitment with which Haneke and his cast throw themselves into a project that itself is a bit supererogatory -- does Kafka's unfinished story really need to be an unfinished film? -- is impressive.