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The Piano Teacher, Directed by Michael Haneke
La Pianiste, Arte, August 31, 2001 (France)
Screenplay: Michael Haneke, based on the novel by Elfriede Jelinek
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, and Benoît Magimel
Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel): You know, love isn’t everything.
Crashing. Aliens, beautiful aliens, crashing into an earthly existence. Gasping at the breath of life, the newborn blinks and squints into piercing, penetrating, violent light. It is the first of a million shattered flashes to follow as years magically morph into flickering bursts of time. All the while, the adolescent-turned-adult (with a heart beating absurdly fast) is hardly afforded adequate chance to pause—stop the world and melt with you—in order to shed the skin of infancy once and for all.
Crawling. Crawing into themselves, long before the failed first steps. Learning quickly the importance of holding on, always holding on. Afraid to let go. Abandoned on the doorsteps of humanity, the vulnerable baby is impossibly and helplessly alive, clinging for dear life in the clutch of embrace.
Steps. First steps, falling. Rising up, perched atop bicycles, falling. Battered and bruised, getting back and falling right back down again. Perpetual descent. Falling off the edge of the surrounding bluffs. And yet, somehow the falling begins to come easy. It is taking the leap—the conscious leap—that proves more difficult with each passing stumble.
Emotion. For some, fear takes over, leaving them on the wrong side of an ever-expanding divide. Can’t let go again, not this time. To pretend that it won’t end the same—equal shots failure and pain—is pointless. Fear of being hurt again creates the perfect trap. Still holding on for dear life, the child in the adult and the adult in the child are finally and at at last stuck, unable to navigate the transition from a caregiver’s protective embrace to the tender passion of a lover’s waiting arms. All hope of union dissolves in the wake. The lover is rejected, doomed to repulsion.
Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert): Do I disgust you?
Limbo. It is a tragic limbo. Neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic. Just is, as limbos tend to be. The newborn that was always there, seemingly tucked forever away far beneath the surface of the adult—just an invisible piece of the soul—cries out in the darkness once again, except this time, brutally stripped bare of the blanket of innocence.
Mrs. Schober (Susanne Lothar): How can somebody be so evil?
Love. It is love that is to blame. Love, the dying game. No winners. Just lovers and losers, beginnings and endings. Always, endings. Make no mistake, it is love and not the lover that is to blame here. The lover is merely human after all.
Return to sender. On queue, love exits stage left. Flames burn into embers that smolder into dust. Careful, don’t choke. Useless love. Dancing and scattering before vanishing at last atop the wings of the cold harsh wind.
-G
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