www.camerastylo.com
www.camerastylo.com
by Derek Lam
The
Piano Teacher
directed by Michael
Haneke
Michael Haneke's La pianiste (The Piano Teacher) became something of a cause célèbre earlier in the year when Susan Sontag, in her column for Artforum, placed the film among her Ten Best for 2001, and openly questioned the New York Film Festival's decision to snub the film despite its having won the Best Actor, Best Actress, and Grand Prix awards at Cannes. While there's something to the argument that the work of a major filmmaker like Haneke (who tends in general to be better received in European critical circles than here) ought to have its exposure at the NYFF and that audiences be allowed the opportunity to debate themselves over the merits of the film, it's also not hard to see, on the evidence of La pianiste, why Haneke has not been a regular presence at the festival and the reasons for which a number of critics (the present writer included) still find dubious the claim that he is among the top flight of filmmakers working in world cinema today.
A glum diagnostician of social malaise, Haneke built his reputation over the last decade on a number of serious if rather generalized critiques of contemporary European upper middle-class existence. Films like The Seventh Continent, Funny Games, and Code Inconnu present themselves as clinical, grotesque studies of the dehumanizing effects of affluence, material well-being, and class-bound insularity and complacence, often focused on the causes of and socially-conditioned responses to violence. The seriousness (some might say "importance") of Haneke's project and the chilliness of his rigorously-controlled filmmaking command attention, but the inclination to avoid any form of observation but instead work from the top down with grand statements that are illustrated with abstracted characters and conceptualized contrivances results in works that, thanks also in part to Haneke's straight-faced solemnity, feel calculated, predictable, and not a little airless.
In one significant respect, La pianiste differs from these earlier works: Isabelle Huppert's involvement provides the first genuine star-turn in a Haneke movie (the presence of the now seemingly unavoidably iconographic Juliette Binoche in Code Inconnu only gave Haneke further opportunities to reduce his characters to mere ciphers), and it is Huppert's triumph that her character comes across as recognizably human. Her performance invests the many scenes of humiliation and desperation in La pianiste with a pathos that has hitherto eluded Haneke and his brand of knee-jerk subversive, shock tactics filmmaking. But Huppert aside (and despite the fact that the film is adapted from a novel), we're still very much deep in Haneke territory. The caricatured use of classical music and its perceived world of perfection, order, civility, and endless practice as a metaphor for social and sexual discipline is quintessential Haneke, and close to self-parody. The script might drop references to Adorno and Schubert, but the high concept of Haneke's conceit and his inability to create a convincing milieu for his characters means that the film ends up rehearsing and trading in the same clichés about classical music as such less interesting and mediocre movies as Madame Sousatzka or Shine - the same overbearing parents, the same episodes of stage fright and nervous jitters, the same laughable, mock-insider gibberish parading as musical insight ("In Beethoven, it's better to hit a wrong note than a wrong interpretation.")
Amusingly, the film's thesis of socially-conditioned emotions and sexual impulses occasions a field-day for Haneke to illustrate for dummies basic Freudian and Foucauldian notions of corporeal control and regulation. Aside from the central, S&M antics, he inserts such piquant details as a pianist in tears who, reeling from a brutal audition session, sniffs a large blob of snot back into her nose. Another episode finds Haneke making clear to the audience the annoyance of Huppert's fastidious, anal Erika when her student, tearful and distressed, complains of diarrhea. If nothing else, Haneke manages the near-impossible feat of beating Tsai Ming-Liang in the bodily fluids sweepstakes: his own control-freak obsession with the idea means that La pianiste is overflowing with blood, semen, urine, vomit, and tears, alternately withheld and released in a cycle of repression and transgression.
I saw La pianiste with a typically ironic New York crowd who laughed through half the film, and it's hard to deny anyone's mirth when it comes to Erika's overbearing mother, a risible invention few can take seriously besides Erika and Haneke. But Huppert's at once tightly wound, pathetic, vulnerable, assertive, poignantly mad Erika is a formidable creature to behold, and it would be unfair to deny Haneke's craft in deftly staging a number of the key scenes in breathtaking, unostentatious long-takes (the near-absolute confinement of any graphic sexuality to off-screen space is a cerebral maneuver typical of Haneke; that it doesn't come across as ham-fistedly obvious as similar attempts in, say, Funny Games at a self-consciously moralistic style is tribute once again to the intensity of Huppert's performance).
Does Haneke belong in the company of those other high-profile, recent NYFF casualties, Béla Tarr and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, whose Werckmeister Harmonies and Millennium Mambo respectively were denied the opportunity to make their U.S. bows at the prestigious festival? I'm still not convinced that Haneke is anywhere near as great a filmmaker as Hou, but La pianiste does represent an attempt at departure, away from the cardboard cutouts of his more schematic and deliberate films to something more human and three-dimensional, and the achievement suggests that someday, perhaps, he might come close. For the sake of Haneke, and the contemporary European mindscape he clearly cares so much about, we keep our fingers crossed.
All written material (c) 2002 by Derek Lam