Teacher's pet

>> Isabelle Huppert ups the twisted ante in La Pianiste

by MATTHEW HAYS

Having built up an extremely impressive persona as an icy, repressed, messed-up mid-life-beauty, Isabelle Huppert outdoes herself with La Pianiste. In the film, she plays an ultra-neurotic fortysomething piano teacher who leads a bitterly unhappy life.

The film, the latest from controversial director Michael Haneke and based on the novel by Elfriede Jelinek, has Huppert playing a bottled-up but brilliant piano teacher working in Vienna. Stuck in a terrifically unhappy living arrangement with her mother (she lies to mom about her whereabouts; mom retaliates by ripping up her clothes), Huppert finds a release for her brewing sexuality in the strangest of places: she enters domain thought of specifically for men, like a peep show, where she watches the acts and picks out sperm-soaked tissues from the garbage to sniff while gazing at the action. Later, she goes to a drive-in and, spying on a couple who are screwing in the back of a car, squats down to take a pee while leering at them.

La Pianiste is an intensely difficult film to watch, with its damaged central figure, who is brought to life in a truly brave performance by Huppert. Right up there with the very best tortured-relationship movies like Last Tango in Paris, the film has Huppert pursued by a randy, macho young student (Benoît Magimel), a younger man turned on by Huppert's command of the instrument and her superior status.

The film then turns to strange psycho-sexual dynamics, as Huppert acknowledges the attraction by writing a letter, full of lengthy descriptions of what fantasies she wishes to fulfill with Magimel. Among other things, Huppert wants Magimel to sit on her face and punch her in the stomach so that her tongue is thrust into his anus, while her mother sits in the next room.

It's a deeply disturbing series of head games, one that occasionally feels more sensational than meaningful. But the overall power of Jelinek's character study cannot be denied. La Pianiste is easily one of the most jarring films I've seen in years, a truly cinematic work of art that challenges on a series of levels. Jelinek has been described as everything from self-hating to a visionary feminist for this work. For her part, the author has suggested that the book indicates what happens to a woman who dares to by a voyeur, typically a role reserved for privileged men. Whatever its intended themes, La Pianiste is not pleasing. But you won't be able to turn away.

La Pianiste Screens at the FCMM, and opens Monday, Oct. 22