Isn’t Isabelle Huppert just the greatest actress in the world? While this may seem unprofessionally hyperbolic, I absolutely adore her, and I believe her to be one of the most extraordinary performers to ever work in cinema, due to her relentless brilliance across genres. Many have debated her finest hour, with quite a bit of the attention going to last year’s Elle, a dark and twisted revenge tale that brought Huppert quite a bit of worldwide acclaim and mainstream awards (not like she has ever needed awards to prove her brilliance), and while I am partial to her incredible performance in Things to Come as well as Elle, I think her best performance came about from one of her collaborations with another European provocateur, the incredible Michael Haneke, who also brought about one of his signature psychological thrillers, The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste). Controversial, shocking and difficult to watch, The Piano Teacher is a morbidly fascinating character study that proves to be one of the most vexing psychosexual thrillers to come out of the twenty-first centuries.

Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a lonely, middle-aged piano teacher working at a music conservatory in Vienna. By day, she is a strict, authoritarian educator who degrades any student who does not meet her impossibly high standards, and by night she is a victim to her unstable mother (Annie Girardot) and her fits of rage, suspicion, and jealousy, who monitors her daughter every hour of the day. In between this, Erika finds time to explore her sexual fantasies, which are, to be reductive and understate the truth significantly, perverse and twisted. She engages in acts of voyeurism and self-mutilation, while also fantasizing about ruthlessly violent sexual intercourse that borders on rape. Erika is finally given the opportunity to explore these sexual desires when she finds herself falling for the confident and charming Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), who proves himself to be the dominating figure she desired. However, as their relationship becomes more intense, Erika finds herself both relishing and regretting her relentless pursuit of these desires, and she realizes that fantasies can sometimes leave the individual scarred for life, mentally as well as physically.

What is there to say about Isabelle Huppert? I could talk about her for hours and still not even touch the surface of the panoply of ways she proves herself to be at the very peak of influential and remarkable performers. She has been known to be adept at playing a variety of characters, but the one archetypal character-type that she has been able to dominate above all others is that of the overly-confident but secretly insecure woman who looks out for herself rather than others, while still looking for some form of deeper meaning which she hopes to find through some human interaction, despite her apparent disdain for everyone else. Huppert’s confidence as an actress continuously illuminates the screen, particularly in The Piano Teacher, a film that requires Huppert to play one of her most unlikable and cold-hearted characters to date, yet still a character that we empathize with (not throughout the entire film, because Erika is a character with desires that are shocking and unbelievably dark, and I doubt many of us would want to be able to relate to such perversions) and her ultimate downfall is akin to a great tragedy, and far more bleak. Huppert’s ability to oscillate from cold-hearted and mean-spirited, to emotionally weak and deeply vulnerable is truly masterful and proves Huppert as an actress capable of making us simultaneously despise and sympathize with a character simply through the way in which she conveys the raw desire and emotions that go through her character during the events of the film. In every expression and gesture, Huppert crafts Erika as a complex and resonant character who may be morally and ethically-ambiguous, but also one who the audience can connect with through her loneliness and her suffering at the hands of an abusive individual. In the simplest terms (because one often finds themselves needing to exercise some form of considerable restraint when talking about Isabelle Huppert), The Piano Teacher proves to be an utterly masterful example of a truly exquisite performance, and Huppert’s wonderful dedication to this role simply reiterates her position as one of the most talented performers working today.

Yet, as much as this film is about Huppert (as many of her greatest performances similarly focus on her strong-willed and independent characters), it is a film that also follows another character, Walter, who is played to utter perfection by Benoît Magimel, who is also adept at toggling between being charming and endearing, to absolutely malicious and ill-spirited, intent on causing other characters, mainly Erika, utter and permanent damage. The Piano Teacher is a film that focuses on two very unlikable characters, but whereas Erika’s nature comes from her sexual repression and curious perversions, it seems like Walter’s personality is a response to his raging sexuality and toxic masculinity, where he feels the need to assert his power over absolutely anyone he comes across, displaying his dominance to the point where it puts him in the enviable position of being able to get what he wants, while getting away with it. The bleakest aspect of The Piano Teacher is not what Walter does that permanently damages Erika physically and mentally, it is the disturbing fact that he got away with it while the middle-aged, sexually-repressed spinster will have to live with for the rest of her life, which is a statement Elfriede Jelinek made so overt in her novel on which this film is based.

It would also be canny to note that Annie Girardot is wonderful in this film, and she goes far beyond archetypal mother-figure roles in her performance as Erika’s domineering mother, who controls her daughter in every way, and ultimately feels the consequences of her actions towards her daughter. The Piano Teacher is a film that is relatively without flaws, but if there was one part of it that would have been fascinating to accentuate, it would be the dynamic between Erika and her mother. Whereas the novel does approach this relationship a bit more, the film itself may not entirely ignore it, but it places it in the background far too often, which sadly just glossed over a fascinating aspect of the film. Yet despite having said this, Girardot is a scene-stealer that is able to play a character as complex as her daughter, switching between being a loving and endearing mother, to a malicious and violently-abusive woman who exploits her daughter out of spite and jealousy. The Piano Teacher is mainly a film about identities, and how the three main characters change their personas throughout, being able to present themselves as different individuals to an extent, depending on their (meta)physical environment and the company they are in. The way in which these actors are able to convey these different personas is nothing short of incredible, and their commitment to these roles are entirely admirable, as they give truly remarkable performances that are deeply unsettling and soaringly bold in their complexities.

Here is something that may appear to be a criticism, but it is actually the highest compliment in terms of what I am intending to say: Michael Haneke lacks restraint, and he often goes too far in his films. The reason behind this seemingly incendiary statement is that Haneke constantly imbues his films with bleak and shockingly bold moments, and he forces the audience intimately into that world, to the point where it becomes uncomfortable, awkward and absolutely riveting. The way in which Haneke lingers on shots are absolutely astonishing – in moments where a more conventional director would cut, Haneke’s camera stays on a character, watching their evolving state of mind and development. One just needs to look at Walter’s audition scene, or the scene in which Erika watches as Walter reads her letter where she outlines her sexual desires, to understand exactly what I mean – expression is important in any acting performance, but I rarely see a director who foregrounds non-verbal performance quite like Haneke – and the way his camera lingers far longer than what is conventional (or at least, commonly expected) is astounding. The Piano Teacher is a film that is not particularly aesthetically pleasing, and it is unbelievably bleak, but the method in which Haneke manipulates form to emphasize content is highly provocative and simply staggering.

The Piano Teacher is a provocative film mainly because of the way in which it approaches sexuality. It has been called a “psychosexual thriller” by many critics (including myself, slightly earlier), and while there are many films that fall into this category, very few are as tasteful – I use this term with caution, referring to the fact that Haneke never resorts to overly-explicit and excessive uses of violence and sexual intercourse to convey the inherent brutality of the story, rather opting for more subversive but no-less shocking methods of representing these actions – as The Piano Teacher. The way in which The Piano Teacher explores sexuality, particularly female sexuality, is somewhat groundbreaking. It does not simply show a woman as being capable of sexual desire and not simply being the object of desire of hyper-masculine men, but also shows that anyone (even the most unexpected individuals) is capable of twisted and violent sexual perversions and that violent sexuality is not restricted to one particular demographic. Importantly, The Piano Teacher is not a film that glorifies sexual violence or perversion in any way, but rather foregrounds it as something realistic and unfortunately something that exists in reality. The Piano Teacher is shocking particularly because of the way in which it shows violent sexual desire existing within the mind of a mild-mannered piano teacher, as well as how such desires can result in cauterizing pain when made tangible.

Moreover, The Piano Teacher is shockingly brutal, but it is also not overly-exploitative, as evident in the rape scene, which is filmed in one very uncomfortable take that lasts nearly six minutes – it is horrifying and difficult to watch, but Haneke subverts expectations by focusing the shot almost entirely on the faces of the victim and the perpetrator. This morbid and unbelievably dark climactic scene is distressing precisely because of the focus on the characters and their emotional reactions conveyed throughout it. Haneke has developed a distinctive habit of showing realistic emotional development even in the most horrific and abhorrent of situations, and perhaps by focusing solely on reaction rather than the action itself, the brutality of the scene is heightened as the suffering evident on the victim’s face is far too frighteningly real. The ultimate subversion of the cinematic representation of sexual violence is that the most dauntingly difficult aspect of this scene (as well as the other scenes of sexual encounters throughout the film) is not the actual rape, but rather the immediate aftermath, which is brutal and scarring, and has failed to leave my mind ever since, as seeing the effects of these repulsive actions is utterly terrifying. Haneke does not shy away from showing the harsh truth about a very real and tragically far too common occurrence, but he does so in a manner that is not exploitative or gruesomely violent but still jarring and unbelievably tough to sit through. There are very few films that are as relentlessly provocative in displaying sexual desire and perversion as The Piano Teacher, a film that makes some extraordinarily bold choices in its representations of sexuality.

I found The Piano Teacher to be an incredibly complex and brilliant film, one that takes an unflinching approach in representing the story in a way that does not glorify sexual violence or perversions, but also does not portray it as something entirely foreign or far-fetched – it shows the perversions that do exist, as well as the aftermath after the co-mingling of dark and disturbing perversions through encounters between similarly damaged individuals. It is a grotesquely difficult film to watch, and that is precisely why The Piano Teacher is such an extraordinary film -Haneke does not attempt to shy away from the truth of what the novel and the film intended to say, and through bringing out career-defining performances from the cast, he is able to craft a film that will leave you disgusted and exhilarated, as it is an experience that will leave you entirely breathless and reeling from the emotionally-horrific and morally-ambiguous nature of this film. More than anything else, The Piano Teacher is a film that does not rely on the core of sexual perversions, but rather serving to be a film about the over-arching effects of a specific mindset in a particular society, and how one’s upbringing and environment can influence an individual in their thoughts and actions. Isabelle Huppert is always good, but she may just have done her best work here (even though I still really adore Things to Come, which I’ve already stated and will continue to state at every relevant opportunity). Her performance as Erika is complex and nuanced, and she inhabits this film exceptionally well. The Piano Teacher is a film that challenges the audience. It is not an easy film to watch, but it is provocative, controversial and utterly brilliant.