"The Piano Teacher" Film Diary

“The Piano Teacher”, known as “La Pianiste” in France, was released in 2001 and was directed by Michael Haneke. “The Piano Teacher” is about Erika, who teaches piano lessons for a living. She lives with her mother who to say she has a dysfunctional relationship, is an understatement. An example of this dysfunctional relationship is in one of the very first scenes of the film, where Erika comes home, it appears to be late, and finds her mother waiting up for her. Erika is a middle-aged woman and not a teenager or child. Her mother violently erupts at her, they slap each other, and her mother rips her dress. The even stranger thing is that they sleep in the same bed every night, as if they were married. As a piano teacher, Erika is flat out mean and treats many of her students very poorly. She torments one of the younger boys who takes lessons with her, and in another disturbing scene, she puts broken glass in the pockets of a little girl at a recital. Erika becomes attracted to one of her students, Walter, and Walter becomes attracted to Erika. They have a strange relationship, where Erika wants him to hurt her sexually. Erika is also very sexually repressed and sexually disturbed. At one point in the film, she goes to a peep show, just to go into the booth and smell the semen filled tissues that were discarded by other men. At another point in the film, she attempts to have sex with her mother, is that dysfunctional? And finally, she goes to the drive-in movie’s just to walk around and find couples being intimate. When she was caught, she ran off.
The main theme of “The Piano Teacher” is that Erika is mentally disturbed, sexually disturbed, and sexually repressed. The dysfunctional relationship with her mother was also a main theme of “The Piano Teacher”.
I hated this film. I felt that it was very slow, and quite frankly I just didn’t “get it”. I say I didn’t “get it” because this film won many awards and I quite frankly thought that “The Piano Teacher” was just trying to be shocking. I also feel that many of the people who loved “The Piano Teacher” loved it because it was shocking and not necessarily because it was a good film. Of course, being an art film the word shocking should be replaced with disturbing, because then it sounds like it is artsy. The acting in “The Piano Teacher”, however was good. The actress who played Erika sold me on the idea that she should be institutionalized for a long period of time. I didn’t particularly like that actor that played Walter, to me he just came off as being one of the elitist French guys that gives the French a bad name.