The Piano Teacher

Isabelle Huppert delivers a compelling performance in a story about a professional woman with a complicated private life and disturbing sexual proclivities. No, we're not talking about Paul Verhoeven's "Elle," but rather an earlier project: Michael Haneke's 2001 film "The Piano Teacher."

This film presents Huppert in the role of Erika Kohut, a professor at an elite Viennese conservatory. Her demeanor is as icy as her core is hot and seething with emotional violence; her students and colleagues see her facade, that of an aloof and unmovable woman whose only true passion lies in music. At home, however -- in the flat she shares with her controlling, jealous mother (Annie Girardot) -- it's a different story: Arriving late or spending too much on a new dress is enough to kick off volcanic flurry and a wild tussle.

One young man has the talent, confidence, and sexual magnetism to crack Erika's invulnerable shell: Walter (Beno�t Magimel), an engineering student whose proficiency in matters technical as well as artistic opens the world in all its passionate possibilities rather than choking it off. His interest in Erika -- and her reluctant, but undeniable interest in him in return -- throws her world off balance, but neither of them is able to offer the other what he or she wants.

That's the stuff of romantic dramas gone wrong, but there's a twist: Things really heat up between them when, in a restroom tryst, Erika gets Walter worked up -- but refuses to get him off. This is a Mars and Venus story in which masculine and feminine -- or anyway, certain versions of them -- swing to dangerous extremes, and yet the film possesses and maintains a precise delicacy of tone that embraces horrific developments (among them the mangling of a young woman's hand and the possible end of her musical ambitions) without blinking.

This Criterion Collection Blu-ray includes new interviews with the director (Hanekle flatly refuses to buy into the notion that the film is pornographic, though he parses the meaning of what it means for art to be "obscene" rather finely) and Huppert (who recollects in some detail the way she and Haneke manage to not work together on several projects before their eventual collaboration here). A 20-minute behind the scenes look at the film's voice dubbing sessions is also included, as is commentary on selected scenes. Harvard Society of Fellows film scholar Moira Weigel contributes an incisive essay that confronts the film's dark currents of sexuality and unhealthy emotional entanglement.

Should you see this? Yes. Should you own it? That depends on how dedicated you are to the arts of cinema and, to an extent, music. The musical selections are lavishly intelligent and meticulously assembled; the execution is first-rate. This is a film of definite merit even if, as Weigel points out, there is a degree of "metaphorical slippage."

"The Piano Teacher"
Blu-ray
$31.96
https://www.criterion.com/films/28739-the-piano-teacher