In 2001, Austrian Michael Haneke directed a film based on the homonym novel by Elfriede Jelinek on the life and perversions of a talented piano teacher in Vienna.
Erika Kohut is a glacial, unfulfilled and repressed woman who has long abandoned her dreams of fame in the music world and has resigned to being a mediocre piano teacher living and sleeping with her mother. Her unconditional submission to her has resulted in Erika’s loneliness and disdain towards the outside world, especially her own students.
In a morbid relationship with sexuality, between masochism (genital mutilation) and voyeurism episodes (shabby peep-shows and sexy shops she visits); Erika rebels against a mother who had prevented her from any affective and physical contact with any man since her youth.
The encounter with the young Walter is then the beginning of a relationship marked by Erika’s obsessions and rigid rules, toward a descend to madness.
Structured as a music concert, The Piano Teacher has in music a diegetic role: a beautiful sonata by Schubert accompanies Erika’s descent into depravity; while Schumann better responds to the storytelling of a sick love that turns into insanity.
The Piano Teacher raises many questions, suggesting answers rather than properly explaining the reasons behind actions and it manages to produce a cathartic effect in the extreme human instincts presented. The result of this visual and musical composition is then a cruel but necessary film to watch.
8. Le Souffle Au Coeur
1971’s film directed by French director Louis Malle, author scandalous themed-films, Le Souffle Au Coeur offers a deep criticism at the French high-bourgeoisie class (from which the same Malle came from): Catholic school, creeping pedophilia and individual growth.
The film recovers the features that deeply mark the work of this great director who, at the age of 24, shot two masterpieces of French cinematography: Les Amantes and Ascenseur pour l’èchafaud. In a mix of genres, documentary gaze is indeed constantly intertwined with a sophisticated narrative taste.
In the France of the Fifties, Camus and Charlie Parker’s enthusiastic teenager, Laurent, son of the gynecologist Charles, is weaned with alcohol, smoke and sex by his older brothers. After the first experience in a brothel, and before knocking at the doors of his own peers, Laurent spends the night of July 14 in bed with his mother Clara, who has always had a special and very open relationship with the kid.
Louis Malle was a cutting-edge explorer: strong, sometimes even shabby, situations are presented with extreme kindness and grace, in the successful attempt to upset the viewer and to create a new and original way of making movies.
Starring a complete range of autobiographical materials, Malle wrote and directed a very personal film, animated by characters off the common sense of morality, brilliant and pleasantly anarchic.
