CHAPTER 31

SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER: THE PIANO TEACHER AND THE CINEMA OF MICHAEL HANEKE

Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste is a French-language movie even though it is set in Austria, directed by an Austrian, and adapted by him from a 1983, autobiographical novel by the Austrian Elfriede Jelinek. Jelinek’s title was Die Klavierlehrerin, whence derives the picture’s North American name: The Piano Teacher (2001). Haneke wouldn’t make it, we’re told, without Isabelle Huppert in the titular role, so the characters speak French despite the fact that they live in Vienna. (Huppert also starred in Haneke’s next picture, Le Temps des loups [The Time of the Wolf, 2003], itself shot in Austria.) This sort of contradiction is common in the American cinema (think of all those Nazis who speak English in so many of our war movies), but becomes more noticeable in foreign films—which probably says more about American ethnocentrism and insularity than it does about linguistic or geographic anomaly in works of art. Yet the difference in language in The Piano Teacher is the least of this picture’s anomalies. And anyone who knows Haneke’s previous work would be prepared for them. He began with what he has called a trilogy—The Seventh Continent (1989), followed by Benny’s Video (1992) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)—that constituted his “reports on the progressive emotional glaciation of my country” (Haneke quoted in Brady, 239). The Seventh Continent is based on a real-life event in which a comfortable, well-insulated bourgeois family extinguished itself in a spasm of communal suicide—the result, the film implies, of lives so lived without connection that they must ultimately disappear into a black hole of their own making. Benny’s Video is about an adolescent who not only interposes action videos between himself and the world, but who also lives in a cave of a room with the blinds perpetually drawn and another video link-up to relay the view outside his apartment building. The succession of videos so desensitizes this teenager to violence, so numbs him to any kind of human empathy, that he can thoughtlessly kill a girl “to see what it’s like.” The film that follows Benny’s Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, is a mosaic of glimpses into urban lives that builds toward—or is built around— one real-life event in which a nineteen-year-old student, Maximilian B., walked into a Viennese bank and shot three people to death. Although Haneke does not suggest that Maximilian’s mind had been turned, like Benny’s, by a constant diet of violent images, his murderous act is imbued with potential significance in spite— or rather because—of its being sucked up into the indiscriminate or generalized

283 Chapter 31 soup of media imagery. And it is the petrifying nature of this imagery, or rather our willing surrender of our lives to the products of the “fantasy industry” (which includes the news business and extends to your home computer), that Haneke seems to be indicting. Haneke’s first film after the trilogy was Funny Games (1997), a hair-raising, almost unwatchable essay on screen violence in which two youths turn up at the well-appointed holiday home of a bourgeois couple and methodically insult, assault, torture, and then kill them along with their child. The cruel joke here is that the actual violence all takes place off-screen. Moreover, Haneke creates an unsettling ambiguity in Funny Games by maintaining an icy, even slightly disdainful distance from both the family and the two young men. Here, as in his earlier pictures, he is a cool, meticulous formalist who favors full-to-long shots in which the camera remains stationary. This is a style we shall also see in The Piano Teacher, and one that, in Haneke’s words, “is an appeal for a cinema of insistent questioning in place of false-because-too-quick answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating nearness” (Haneke quoted in Grundmann, 99). Just a year before The Piano Teacher, in Code Unknown (2000), Haneke took this style to a new extreme with an opening nine-minute tracking shot back and forth along a Paris street. Thus, in a public place, he put the thinking, questioning spectator in the excruciatingly uncomfortable shoes of someone confronting brutality and injustice in a situation where it would be easy—or perhaps not so easy—not to intervene. (The film takes a critical look at the ethnic heterogeneity of contemporary French life through separate characters and their interlocking stories.) In any event, the choice would have to be made, even as one would not have to make such a choice in the voyeur-like or “fourth-wall” situation created by cinematic violence inside the privacy of somebody else’s home. Speaking of voyeurism, that is what fortyish Erika Kohut’s sex life has long consisted of, together with pornography and self-mutilation, in The Piano Teacher. Her bearing rigid and her expression taut, Erika is a strict and exacting piano instructor at the staid Vienna Conservatory. She is a person of considerable artistic gifts, yet she has never become the rich-and-famous concert pianist that her mother had envisioned (and for which the latter had sacrificed). What is less clear is whether Erika has fallen short because she doesn’t quite have the talent and drive, or whether she has purposely sabotaged her own career in order to spite Mother. What is certain is that this mother-daughter relationship is embattled, suffocating, and incestuous in all but deed (nearly in deed one night, when Erika blurts “I love you” as she leaps on her supine parent with obvious sexual intent). The daughter in fact sleeps with her domineering, possessive, manipulative mother in their one- bedroom apartment, their single beds pushed tightly together to yield an image that gives the lie to Erika’s authoritarian façade. She is human development arrested by a stultifying past fused to a subjugating present—a past-cum-present that seems also to have claimed her father, who is dying (or dies in the course of the film) in a mental hospital.

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