Cold cuts
By Johnny Ray Huston

The Piano Teacher's cruel lessons.

ERIKA KOHUT ( Isabelle Huppert) is in bed with an older woman. As they kiss, she cries like a just-born baby. The moment makes a sick sort of sense: the older woman, Erika's mother (Annie Girardot), has attached a million invisible umbilical cords to her from the moment she left the womb. Though Erika's brittle-boned mother spends her days in front of the TV, ingesting white wine with I.V. regularity, she also obsessively monitors her daughter, who leaves their apartment to conduct abusive piano lessons – and smell semen-stained tissues in peep-show booths. Trapped inside the myriad sickly floral patterns of their home, the pair are so hooked into each other that the separation imposed by daily routine rips both of their skins. When they draw blood, they kid themselves it's because that blood is hot. Worst of all, Erika has just fallen in love.

The lucky guy is Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel) a vain, handsome, and aggressive young man from an arts-patron family who has campaigned to become her student. Once he's succeeded, the film's main event begins: a fight between romanticism (represented by Walter) and sadomasochism (represented by Erika, whose unseen, institutionalized father might as well be Sade or Sacher-Masoch). Since his last stateside appearance, in Benoît Jacquot's A Single Girl, the previously skinny Magimel has filled out his Levi's nicely. Walter resembles the conquering hero of a Harlequin book cover. At first his cocky, virile ardor seems weaker than Erika's cold, cutting drillmaster demeanor. But when the pair begin to take on each other's characteristics – as lovers do – the conquering aspect of Walter's personality no longer seems so benign. Erika's love, old and neglected, is no match for his newfound, youthful sadism.

Though French in tone, The Piano Teacher is set in Vienna, home of its musical and psychoanalytical themes. Director Michael Haneke's vision of the city is quite different from that of Max Ophüls in his Letter from an Unknown Woman, the story of which The Piano Teacher – based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek – mirrors and mocks. Haneke sticks to his signature Scandinavian color schemes (bland creams, weak yellows, wan grays); even benign details of set design take on a fetishy quality. The door of the rehearsal room where Erika berates students is soundproofed by studded white leather. The white stalls of a bathroom where she and Walter have their first sexual encounter (she jerks him off as if milking a cow) echo the black booths of her favorite porn shop: both are weirdly opulent, and sterile to a surgical degree.

Haneke's been touted as a non-Dogma icon of anticinema (here television – as in 1997's Funny Games – is his chief media enemy). His new movie, though, is indebted to at least one populist auteur. "Are you sorry because you're a pig or because women are bitches for making you pigs?" Erika asks a timid male pupil after she's caught him looking at porn somewhere outside of her cherished private booths. The question is very Marnie, and Haneke's treatment of male and female physicality calls to mind scholar Tania Modleski's writing on Frenzy-era Hitchcock. The women in The Piano Teacher ooze. Tears fall from their eyes, snot drips from their noses, and vomit ... well, you get the idea. When fear gives one student an untimely bout of diarrhea, Haneke, for once, doesn't show it. But stomach sickness is a holiday in comparison with the next body-fluid emission the girl has in store – in this movie only women bleed, even if Erika has to simulate menstruation with a straight razor.

The late Pauline Kael, a worshiper of charisma, disliked Huppert. It's easy to see why – over three decades this actor has honed a near-mechanical perfection; she's a Gallic Meryl Streep (another Kael pet peeve). But to "like" Huppert is to miss the point, for few stars are so consistently attracted to unpleasant roles. And Huppert has found a nightmarish ideal in Erika. So freckled that she resembles an under-ripe strawberry, she's rigorously minimalist, allowing only the tiniest expressions to invade her character's façade. Walking, Erika arches her left brow, her back stiff, her chin and nose held high. Talking to or fucking with Walter, she can stare for a minute without a single blink. Haneke's scrutiny of Erika is as ruthless as her scrutiny of the students who play for her, and Huppert rewards him with a textbook illustration of a slowly shattering concentration.

Late in the movie, Erika seems to age years in a matter of seconds, suddenly resembling her unnamed (in both the novel and the film) mother. The process is so seamless that Huppert's method isn't apparent. What's missing, though, is any kind of hope or humanity; in place of uncovering a woman's soul, however distorted, Huppert's performance journeys deep into rotten recesses only to discover emptiness. That's the point – a misanthrope's comedy, The Piano Teacher is the feel-bad European art film of the season, perhaps to a fault.

'The Piano Teacher' opens Fri/3 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.