Product Description

The Piano Teacher is a powerful and controversial drama from award-winning Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Code Unknown). Isabelle Huppert gives a performance of astounding emotional intensity as Erika Kohut, a repressed woman in her late thirties who teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory and lives with her tyrannical mother (Annie Girardot), with whom she has a volatile love-hate relationship. But when one of Erika's students, the handsome and assured Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), attempts to seduce her, the barriers that she has carefully erected around her claustrophobic world are shattered, unleashing a previously inhibited extreme and uncontrollable desire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11963 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-05-27
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 129 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
An unexpected critical (Grand Prix at Cannes) and commercial (three months in London's West End) success on its release in 2001, The Piano Teacher is a provocative, but ultimately frustrating, film. The intensifying relationship between Erika Kohut, a Viennese piano teacher whose musical focus is gradually undone by sexual repression, and Walter Klemmer, her uninhibited but unsuspecting student and admirer, lacks an underlying motivation, either physical or emotional, to sustain the tortuous encounters of the film's later stages.

Director Michael Haneke powerfully evokes the claustrophobic décor of the flat that Kohut shares with her dictatorial yet ineffectual mother, with whom her relationship progresses from the pitiful to the farcical. And farce of the blackest kind is what the film descends to, as Kohut and Klemmer play out a vicious game of sado-masochistic control with an intriguing but indecisive conclusion.

Isabelle Huppert is magnificently assured as Kohut, but Benoît Magimel often seems confused as Klemmer, while Annie Girardot resorts to a caricature of the mother. Fans of classical piano will enjoy the masterclass and rehearsal sequences during the first hour, though music is then relegated to a minor role--its deeper relevance to the film being ultimately difficult to define. English subtitles are provided, and the monochrome shades in which the scenes abound come through with suitably wan intensity. Yet it's hard not to feel that a more profound inquiry into the darker side of sexual desire has been lost along the way. --Richard Whitehouse

Special Features
Wide Screen
French
Region 2
Dolby Digital 5.0 French
Dolby Digital 5.0
Interview With Michael Haneke
Interview With Isabelle Huppert
Interview With Benoit Magimel
Theatrical Trailer
English

Synopsis
Erika (Isabelle Huppert) teaches classical piano in a cold and often abrasive style. Approaching middle age, Erika lives with her doting mother (Annie Girardot) and still sleeps in the same bed with her. Erika's social life consists of occasionally sneaking away to a peep show where she secretly comes into contact with perverse passion, often using the discarded trash of previous customers. Her beautiful piano playing seduces youthful Walter (Benoit Magimel), who then takes the instructor's advanced class. Walter reveals his desire during a class session. Erika reacts curiously, presenting a long list of cruel, humiliating sexual acts she would like him to perform on her. Meanwhile, the teacher also torments a talented student (Anna Sigalevitch) who is already plagued by her own fears.
Michael Haneke (CODE UNKNOWN) directed this unflinching allegorical tale of cruelty. The film caused a stir at the Cannes Film Festival where it was controversial not only for its subject matter, but also because it won multiple awards there--the Grand Prize and acting awards for both Huppert and Magimel--despite leaving many audience members outraged. Based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek, the film features numerous classical piano sonatas banged out in an aggressive style.

Customer Reviews

playing on the tune of pornography

ISABELLE HUPERT WON THE BEST ACTRESS AT CANNES AND MAJIMEL WAS BEST ACTOR -THE DVD HAS A FEATURETTE AND THE AWARD CEREMONY TOO -
Life is a natural gift and art is an imitation of life ,it is at best a humanist communication of that imitation to be perceived as an imitation of nature ,as far as music is concerned it is natural as the two are not to be confused with art itself ,music and schubert are presented in the dual persona of the teacher who is coldly intellectual and a perverse voyeur in private ,the right of privacy is inviolable and as such an artist has the right to perceive out of the private life of his character,in this case a sexually repressed woman who is a musical genius ,she fantasises about sex in a pornographic milieu ,this is a satire on sadomasochism as a direct consequence of being borne out of pornographic celebration of perversion.

The movie is great not because the performances of ISABELLE Huppert as the paradoxically real woman intellectual being pursued obsessively by a charming student infatuated by her talent as Majimel are outstanding ,but rather because of the distinction it makes between the fact that nature ceases to be reality as soon as it is rendered into an art media .

the moment you indulge in an artistic maneouvre you enter a different domain ,a replication of life itself while that can be glorious but it can never be the same .

nature and life never change but art does ,as it is a human perception .

This is the primary reason why piano teacher is great because it observes the auto- biography of an austrian author through the cerebral lens of cinema without taking sides between the 2 main characters who are indulging themselves in a controlled manner to their weird passions ,the evolution of majimel from an infatuated youth to a violent rapist is natural as he is a natural animal under his cloak of civility and the woman provkes and awakes that natural beast.

The consequences are shown without any graphic sex in a very cold manner devoid of sexual gratification ,

The man fully aware of his action informs the woman not to report the event,yet he appears totally non-chalant in the next sequence in a public pretense as if nothing transpired ,the woman thus mutilates herself and leaves the music hall,inferred as perceived ,is she dead or is she gone to a porn shop to gratify herself ,

The conundrum has been left by the artist for the audience to conclude as haneke is too wise to judge or conclude for his audience ,and that is what makes his cinema great art as he observes life without trying to make a stylish circus out of it which must tie all the ends in the way mediocre artists fulfill their perfectionist styles ,as perfection is unattainable in art ,it only exists in nature itself and art is only a perception or imitation of nature .

Great cinema indeed by any definition -art or stylish reality ,it is left for us to decide .

The sort of film that gives world cinema a bad name
A slow, boring, pretentious and audience unfriendly film. To signify how important and un-Hollywood it is it has lots of scenes filmed in long static takes that are designed to be boring. The film also features extended classical music interludes. And it has a completely random non-ending.

I don't believe in the psychology of the characters as they're so sketchily drawn. The film keeps the audience and it's own characters at a distance, meaning that as an intense psycho-sexual drama it never gets going. There's more going on under the surface of Basic Instinct than there is in this film.

It's no fun. Avoid unless you want to be bored.

I watched Basic Instinct after this because it infuriated me so much. It might be an illogical piece of stupid trash but at least it did something, and it entertained me while it was doing it. I'll take dumb Hollywood films over movies like this everytime.

If you want an enjoyable, explicit film of substance then I recommend Choses Secrets and Death In A French Garden.

A complete waste of everyone's time
A repressed piano teacher who unaccountably still shares a bedroom with her mother embarks on a relationship with a besotted student but destroys it by demanding kinky sex. It's hard to know what is more surprising about this movie: the fact that the author of the original novel won a Nobel prize or that the luminous Isabelle Huppert would lend her name to such a project. Denounced on release as pornographic, it fails to succeed even on this level, and offers neither insight into human sexuality or characters compelling enough to give the dismal time everyone has any kind of tragic quality. Huppert does her best to inject some life into her role, but her skill as an actress is negated as her character becomes little more than apuppet for authorial/directorial posturing. The attempt at a radical critique of power relations between the sexes collapses into a tired cliche: the attempt of the repressed to live out their deviant desires inevtibaly eads to tragedy. I imagine members of the S&M community would find this film particularly offensive: the notion that a couple of intelligent adults couldn't negotiate their way to a bit of slap and tickle without the situation "spiralling out of control" is patently ludicrous. In an attempt to qualify the movie as "art" everything moves at a snail's pace and is beautifully photographed, but as a cultural artefact of the early 21st century this would have to rank somewhere below the American Pie trilogy.