Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher is a nesting doll of sadomasochistic desire. Forty-something Erika (Isabelle Huppert) is a prim and incising woman; often offering the world around her only an impassive gaze. When Erika seeks release from her life—mainly her suffocating relationship with her codependent mother—it’s often through complex but tidy rituals of self-harm.
The tension with which Erika holds herself is apparent most maladaptively in her responses to sex. Instead of masturbating or fucking when aroused, Erika acts out; shattering glass, pissing next to couples fornicating in cars, and huffing used tissues found in the corners of a sex shop porno booth.
When Erika meets Walter (Benoît Magimel), a young man both insistent upon being trained under Erika’s skilled tutelage and unafraid to express desire toward her, Erika’s first little nesting doll of raw sexual yearning is uncapped. Finally, there is someone with whom she can maybe share her deepest desires; all of which were previously relegated to a tragic shoebox of unused fetish gear—ropes, chains, pantyhose—scuttled under her bed.
Erika first dominates Walter by degrading him in his lessons and jerking him off in a public bathroom, a sort of vetting of his willingness to be with her. But once certain of his interest, Erika scribes her deepest desires to him in cursive in a manner strikingly similar to composing a love letter. It’s a confessional, highly specific, and (as is the often paradoxical role of sexual masochists and submissives) deeply controlling script. Another layer of her repressed desire to surrender to someone is unsheathed.
But the true unveiling of the deepest levels of perverse, sadomasochistic desire in The Piano Teacher occur when Walter improperly and brutishly executes a twisted version of Erika’s desires. Erika’s specific fantasy—to be tied up, violated, and left in her house with her mother—is enacted all wrong. Walter storms into Erika’s house, shoves her mother, hits Erika hard enough to draw blood, and blames her for tainting him as he assaults her.
While Walter’s actions are a nonconsensual perverting of Erika’s daydreamy perversion, The Piano Teacher creates, in a sense, the “purest hit” of Erika’s fantasy. Here is a man who genuinely finds her abhorrent and desperate while she crawls around on the floor before him, here is a man who enacts her fantasy all wrong in service of his own base emotion—thus truly degrading and violating her.
And yet, the final layer is of course the fact that this “ruining” of Erika’s fantasy is still within the confines of a fictional work of art, played out by actors. Her fantasy gone awry is mediated through the screen, and the protection of being able to understand The Piano Teacher in all of its horror and eroticism as a work of fiction leaves us to reflect upon our own responses at a (relatively) safe distance.
Haneke’s lingering, sometimes inscrutable, and often nauseatingly realistic stylization complicates and sometimes sheathes how Erika or Walter ultimately feel about their desires being stripped not just bare, but pushed beyond the intangible world of fantasy into something raw, unnegotiated, and brutal. Thus our response becomes less about how these two characters may feel about what’s unfolding, and more about our own reactions: How do I feel about what I’m seeing? Is there arousal, intrigue, or resonance amongst my disgust? Or vice versa? Am I feeling something I cannot name?
The Piano Teacher refuses to answer these questions for its audience, but that is the ultimately the smallest doll at the center of the nest. The Piano Teacher impassively invites you to reveal your potential hidden desires regarding being seen, coming undone, and surrendering—be it on your terms or otherwise.
