Movie Review: I Stand Alone (1998)

Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone) is a little too big for its britches, a baroque, explosive film heavier on style than substance, though purporting to contain much substance. The style likewise never cast a spell on the viewers, due to the continual jarring of the audience by over-the-top film techniques. Gaspar Noé's first feature film prides itself on its truthfulness and extremity, but it fails to impress much of either on its helpless spectators, leaving instead a distasteful aroma of cynicism.

The film is told almost entirely through voice overs by Philippe Nahon, an unsmiling, hardened older man who plays the film's unnamed main character, the Butcher. His entire life history is rattled off in an opening monologue accompanied by vintage photographs, a life history replete with abandonment, concentration camps, orphanages, fondlings by priests, adulterous lover, retarded children, nagging incestuous thoughts, wrongful indictment, prison time, bankruptcy, manipulation, and unemployment. The Butcher has lived one hell of a horrible life, but on January 3, 1980, he resolves to begin anew. Having moved with his pregnant wife from Paris to northern France, he looks forward to opening his own butcher shop and starting from scratch.

Within moments, however, this dream dissolves. The Butcher's vindictive wife (Frankie Pain), who controls the family finances, lies about putting down the money to buy a shop for him. Unable to afford the shop himself and unable to find suitable employment within his field, he takes on mind-numbing employment as a nursing home's night watchman. The job teaches him the ugliness of old age, the pointlessness of working, and the utter meaninglessness of life and death. He hates his job, he hates his wife, he hates his child in her womb, he hates his mother-in-law whom he lives with (Martine Audrain)--soon his hatred encompasses everything, and we learn about all of it through the vitriol that his internal monologue spouts.

I Stand Alone is a film about bitterness and how it spreads through the body and mind like an all-consuming poison. Bitterness has a way of taking hold of the thoughts and preventing any positive change in direction. How can the Butcher's luck improve when he constantly thinks about the horrible things he has witnessed and the horrible things that he wants to do in response? Unjust things have certainly happened to the Butcher throughout his life--he was thrust into poverty, the Nazis killed his father, a priest molested him, his wife cheated on him--but his inability to forgive or to forget ensures that he will never overcome the bad luck that dogs him. Negativity breeds negativity.

Rather than trudge forward hopefully--a path that seems idiotic and blind at first but that would yield infinite results in the end--the Butcher seeks to blame others for the failures of his life. And since in many cases he cannot directly retaliate against the real perpetrators (the Nazis are gone after all, and his wife is dead, and who can really be blamed for societal poverty or for children being born handicapped?), he instead directs his rage against easier targets: women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, people with jobs, Germans, his unborn child, himself. He attacks his wife, beating her pregnant belly. He lashes out at strangers, calling them fags. He concocts elaborate, violent revenge fantasies. With nothing to hold onto and the conviction that life is nothing more than a cruel, selfish joke that goes on too long, he decides to end his life in a blaze of destruction.

He does have one small source of love that he still clings to, however. His daughter, a frowning, mute teenager with a mental handicap, is the only goodness he can still see in the world, and not wanting to leave her to fend for herself amongst the wild animals in the ferocious jungle, he decides that he will kill her out of mercy before slaughtering a sacrificial victim to represent all of his frustrations and then taking his own life. His love for her is not without its impurities, though. Obsessed with corruption and sin, he cannot shake the idea that he wants to have sex with his daughter. Would that matter in a meaningless world? Would it even be worth it, or would it ultimately be as joyless as everything else? Why would he really want to destroy the one pure love he possesses on earth by corrupting it in such a way?

The Butcher imagines the horror of shooting his beloved daughter. He imagines the difficulty of embracing his own violent death. And then, after an hour and a half of hateful sneering, accusations, violence, and drinking, he dissolves into tears, embracing his daughter and confessing that he loves her while "Pachelbel's Canon" plays. This moment of loving selflessness and complete surrender within a film mired down by ugliness and cruelty is deeply affecting, but even this final moment is evanescent, as the Butcher's thoughts return once more to rape and revenge.

I Stand Alone is a disquieting film, not just because it depicts murder and the beating of a pregnant woman but more so because it exists entirely within the mind of a pathologically angry man. The Butcher's diatribes are constant, and for the most part they are not nearly as insightful or interesting as the Butcher thinks they are. I know that's probably intentional on Gaspar Noé's part, but that doesn't keep the excessive cynicism from being obnoxious. Even more jarring about the film are the constant directorial intrusions--abrupt, deafening gunshots that accompany almost every rapid camera movement, title cards that emphasize abstract concepts like "morality" and "justice," extreme close-ups, and even a countdown warning that the viewers should leave the theater prior to the violent climax. These "anything goes" stylistic flairs might be fun in a more entertaining, upbeat film, but the bleak nature of I Stand Alone demands more serious handling. I Stand Alone has its moments and is certainly not a stupid film, but it falls far short of its successor, Irreversible.

I Stand Alone (1998)
d/w: Gaspar Noé
(Philippe Nahon, Blandine Lenoir)
6/10

Movie Review: Irreversible (2002)

Where can lines safely and firmly be drawn between pleasures, perversions, and outright transgressions? Are such lines possible, or have the boundaries between sexual acceptability and indecency become too dangerously blurred?

Gaspar Noé's beautiful yet nerve-shatteringly disturbing tragedy Irreversible examines this theme among many other insightful inquiries.

Throughout history, various periods have been marked by more or less accepting attitudes toward deviant sexual practices. In our present time, a long list of sexual fetishes have entered the common lexicon: sadism, masochism, bondage, coprophagia, water sports, fisting, electrostimulation, furrydom, and so forth into more obscure territories. These perversions in essence are harmless. Consensual, safe, democratic participation is sought on the parts of all parties, even when the playacting involves dangerous rape. Many people today (though certainly not all) will respect another person's desire to privately engage in consensual and legal though unusual sexual practices in private with their partners, even if they don't find those particular practices appealing. Kinks and fetishes, embarrassing and private as they are, are more widespread and thus less abnormal than the average person will admit, so a tolerant attitude is in part a reaction against hypocrisy.

Sexual pleasure is a peculiar thing. Who can say where and how it's hardwired in the brain? While some people--guided by religion or tradition or their own personal preferences--will maintain set, narrow guidelines for the circumstances under which any normal person should be able to derive suitable sexual pleasure, others will admit that what works for one person might not work for all. Conflicts over what makes good sex arise even within close, loving relationships.

In a late scene in Irreversible--which, chronologically, is an early scene since the film is told in reverse--Alex (Monica Bellucci) discusses with her current (Vincent Cassel) and her ex-boyfriend (Albert Dupontel) the conditions that allow her to orgasm. Ex-boyfriend Pierre was very loving but a failed lover, whereas present boyfriend Marcus is a selfish pig who achieves excellent results in bed. They have this loud and explicit conversation in public on a crowded Metro car, which seems oddly indiscreet to me being a southern American but which perhaps is more commonplace in Paris, where nobody even turns a head, pointing to a very sexually tolerant and permissible environment. Pierre talks to his dedication to lovemaking--his orgasmic self-sacrifice, his physical diversity, his poetic whispers, all of which were unsuccessful. At which point Alex admits that what is most important to her is the satisfaction of the man she's with. She doesn't want a man sacrificing his orgasms for her continued pleasure; she wants a man who is having a great time. If the man comes, then she will come.

This admission is eerily ironic given that later in the night (and earlier in the film) Alex is raped by someone entirely interested in his own pleasure. Needless to say, she does not enjoy this. The rapist, a bisexual pimp known as Le Tenia, "the Tapeworm" (Jo Prestia), is a sneering, ugly parasite who extorts money from transgendered prostitutes and spends his free time at The Rectum, a red-lit, underground labyrinth of extreme sexual deviancy. Accustomed to an environment where men willingly beg to be raped, tortured, tied up, and fisted and where exploited sex workers are more or less willing to submit to fantasies of domination and adultery, Le Tenia's perceptions of acceptable interpersonal behavior are, to say the least, warped. He compliments Alex as he rapes her, and as he holds a knife to her face he asks her if she is turned on by the sadism. His words hover somewhere between mocking derision and a genuine belief that this passing woman might actually enjoy the brutal sex act, like so many in the past who have enjoyed simulated rape with him while pretending to resist.

There is no forgiving Le Tenia, however, for his actions are rooted not in an attempt to share good sex with Alex but in a hateful, destructive derision. Le Tenia comes across Alex in a red-lit, filthy, concrete highway underpass while threatening one of his hookers. Alex cowers in response to the violence, a fearful reaction that titillates Le Tenia. Though he is not normally interested in women, he is motivated to rape Alex by a desire to punish her--first and foremost for having witnessed his indiscretion, but mostly out of jealous rage against her beauty, wealth, and normality. His gruesome crime is in part an act of class warfare, a violent revolt against the bourgeois morality that he imagines she represents. By raping her, by accusing her of enjoying it, and by ultimately destroying her physically with his fists and feet, Le Tenia attempts to taint the pure, white-clad Alex with his subterranean evil.

On a certain level, Irreversible is a bellicose depiction of a clash between classes, an upper and a lower class divided not by economic status but by values, a division made trivial by being wrought with hypocrisy. In the opening scene, a fat, naked man confesses to his accepting friend that he went to prison for having sex with his daughter. Despite his own severe depravity, he allows himself the superiority of deriding the gay men who flock to the Rectum club in his neighborhood. He is an incestuous, pedophile rapist, but at least he's not a queer! Alex's boyfriend Marcus is an adulterous, immature drug addict, but when he launches on a reckless course to avenge his battered girlfriend, he allows himself to launch insults against everyone he passes, including those who help him. He beats a man at the sex club who is the only person who can identify the rapist for him. He chastises gay men in a restaurant, even though they can help him find the Rectum club where the rapist cavorts. He hurls racist insults at and steals the cab of a Chinese taxi driver who is driving him to his destination. Most tellingly, he assaults and threatens the transsexual prostitute who can tell him exactly who raped his girlfriend. His unnecessary violence is no different or better than the beating that Le Tenia gave to the very same hooker earlier in the night (later in the film), the beating that involved Alex in Le Tenia's life.

Marcus considers himself better than the trash he comes across during his vengeful journey into hell, but not only does he need this trash in order to continue his journey, he is also no different or better than the trash.

Even Pierre, easily the noblest man in the film, is not without sin. A professor and philosopher, he is reserved, mature, and calm, and he expresses a genuine concern for Alex's safety and feelings, but even he is preoccupied with sex, crossing boundaries to engage Alex in the explicit discussion on the Metro, which she tolerates even though she is obviously unhappy with it. Alex allows room for an indiscretion, and Pierre unashamedly takes it. A complex film about rape must also say something about personal space and consent, and Irreversible chillingly hints at these specifics. In the final scene of the film, a bedroom scene between Marcus and Alex, the nude and horny Marcus prods at various taboos, aggressively seeking new territory from Alex that she hesitantly relents to. There is talk of sexual punishment and of anal sex. The talk is gentle and consensual, but in what ways does it erase the boundaries between what Alex truly wants, what she's willing to give, and what she might be forced to give? Structured as the climax of the film--following the revenge, the rape, and the argument--these scene is charged with a power it otherwise wouldn't have if the film were told linearly. Given our knowledge of what will happen later in the night, we see the rape from within this scene as an explicit, external culmination of Alex's internal fears about her relationship--that she is losing control. She has just learned she is pregnant (the final revelation of the film, which adds a horrifying twist to the rape and beating), and she is unable to control her lover--the baby's father--in bed in ways that she should be able to control him. This powerless escalates at the Metro, where she is forced into an uncomfortable, indecent conversation by the one man she does seem to trust and where she feels subjugated to her man, who wraps his arm around her and cups her breast in a very possessive way. (It's easy not to notice her face during this scene, since Pierre and Marcus do all the talking at this moment, but the expression that covers her as Marcus wraps his arm around her torso is one of surreal horror and helplessness.) At the party, she loses complete control of how her life should be ordered. Her boyfriend, a future father who should be acting responsible and committed to her, abandons himself in drugs and attempts to seduce numerous other women. When she leaves the party and--unable to hail a cab--crosses through the underpass on the advice of a stranger ("It's safer!"), her life descends into complete hopeless chaos. She is anally raped and beaten into a coma. Her universe dissolves.

Gaspar Noé offers predestination as a consideration in the film. The title, the backwards structure, the spiraling omniscient camera, and the epitaph "Time Destroys Everything" encourage this thought process, as do a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alex's references to a philosophical book about time that she is reading. Premonitory dreams alert us to the future according to the book, and Alex indeed dreams about entering the red tunnel before it happens. (Marcus also dreams about being unable to feel his arm, which inversely foretells the fact that later in the night he will have that same arm broken.) Everything is written beforehand, the author claims, and fate cannot be changed. We experience this firsthand by watching the film, since we have already seen what is coming. Knowing that the future is miserable, we likewise feel the same helplessness that Alex feels, though we witness it in reverse. Gaspar Noé has made a truly discomforting and terrifying film, the most disturbing one I have ever seen, and this is fitting given that his two major themes are two of the ugliest elements of human nature: sexual and physical violence--or, more specifically, rape and revenge.

The early scenes of the film detail Marcus's revenge tragedy. When we first see him in the film, he is being hospitalized and Pierre is being arrested, so we know--as in any revenge tragedy--that things will end poorly. To explain things chronologically, after discovering Alex's comatose body, Marcus and Pierre are interrogated by the police. The police know nothing, and the best lead they are able to come up with is that Pierre did it. In the depths of their dismay, the duo is approached by two soft-spoken thugs who promise inside information and revenge. The police are for pussies, they claim. Revenge is for men. The two thugs exploit the tragedy, seeking payment, of course, but they deliver on their promise. Navigating the criminal underworld, Alex and Pierre are led underground to the cavernous corridors of the Rectum.

At this point Pierre insists that revenge is for animals. Men should derive their actions from the higher faculties. Rather than pursue a path that can only lead to ultimate destruction, they should go to the hospital to sit with Alex. Marcus refuses to listen. Though he could care less about Alex when they were at the party, now he must overcompensate to avenge his woman. Finding the man he believes to be Le Tenia, he starts a fight before a live audience of sex fiends. He is quickly overpowered, however, and the man snaps his arm in half.

At this point Pierre, who has maintained his cool throughout the hunt despite being profoundly upset by Alex's fate, knocks down the assailant with a fire extinguisher and then proceeds to repeatedly bash in the man's skull with the heavy, thudding instrument. The man's jaw quivers as his blood splattered face caves in. Though one or two hits would surely suffice, calm and passionless Pierre is overpowered by rage and revenge. He demolishes the man beyond repair. By showing this extremely brutal murder in one of the opening sequences of the film rather than at the end, we are forced to examine the outcome of revenge without regard to its incitement. The revenge is horrible, animalistic, primal, demonic. It unlocks something in Pierre that can never be covered up, and it kills an innocence in him that can never be regained. By seeing the revenge before knowing why it's happening, we have no desire to cheer for it or support it. We must examine it on its own terms and decide that there can be no justification for its brutality.

Even more unsettling--though this is not readily apparent on first viewing--is that they attack the wrong man. Le Tenia is one of the passive spectators of the fight, who smiles and snorts drugs while devouring the murder with his eyes. Though the thug informants promised results--that the rapist would be punished instead of, at worst, spending a peaceful life being cared for in prison--the consequences of reckless revenge are disastrous. The wrong man is destroyed, the guilty man will now probably never be caught, and the avengers will be punished instead. Not to mention that nothing can change that Alex was raped and beaten.

The men at the sex club watch the beating but in no way involve themselves in trying to stop it. Some of them even encourage grislier violence, like spectators at the Roman circus. Given the nature of film, we are spectators, too, though different in that we could not help or change things even if we wanted to. One of the most horrifying images in this thoroughly horrifying film is the silhouette of a man who passes in the background of the underpass while Alex is being raped. He takes a few steps forward, pauses, and then hurriedly leaves. Did he realize it was rape, or did he think it was consensual, perverse sex that he should just tolerate and ignore? If he realized it was rape, why didn't he interfere? Would we interfere--or, more importantly, would we interfere after having seen this film and this shadow of a passerby? By showing us this nightmare, Gaspar Noé prepares us to react heroically in the (hopefully never-will-happen) event that we find ourselves in the same position as the faceless passerby. Hopefully, we will not remain faceless, retreating in the shadows. Hopefully, we will know to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. In a rare bit of heroism in the film, the prostitutes rise up with curses and sticks to defend their troubled sister when Marcus attacks one of the prostitutes. Courage like this is in short supply in Irreversible.

There is an infinite variety of sexual practices. Many of them are fine. Some of them aren't. The nude man's friend in the opening scene laughingly dismisses the man's incestuous rape as merely "the Western syndrome," par for the course. When Alex's mutilated body is discovered, some of the spectators on the sidewalk seem satisfied and entertained. "Some whore got raped!" one of them cheers, as though the fact that the woman may have worked in the sex industry makes it okay that she was nearly killed. Rape is never okay, but how can you tell when rape is actually rape in a world where some people genuinely want to be raped in a way that looks, feels, and sounds like rape yet isn't actually rape?

Irreversible is a clever and complicated film that operates on many levels. Though unsettling to the core, the film is a beautiful work of craftsmanship. Gaspar Noé's fluid, ghostlike camera (with cinematographer Benoît Debie) weaves in and out of cars and buildings, hovering and spinning, inducing vertigo and nausea in the viewer. Cuts are seamless, giving the impression of one endless (though nonlinear!) take, a feeling which increases the dramatic inertia and hopelessness of the film's story. The acting, largely improvisational, is flawless, with desperation pervading in the lives of normal people. Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk did the score, a pounding, hellish, nerve-shocking techno soundscape that regulates the heartbeat in stressful ways. Visual effects by Rodolphe Chabrier are more extensive than they appear (a good mark of any special effects artist) since the impressive camerawork, cutting, and detailing received a thorough (though unnoticeable) digital makeover. The bashed in skull of the man in the revenge scene, one of the most unforgettable and macabre moments of cinematic history, was impressively fabricated using a combination of matte painting, latex models, 3D imaging, and acting. The attention to detail--a jaw that gasps for air even after the rest of the face has been rendered unrecognizable--turns just another murder into one of the most gruesome murders ever filmed, and Chabrier should have received more recognition for that.

Irreversible is an unpleasant film, and many will avoid trying to think about it too hard, if indeed they're even able to watch the whole thing. Though they may dismiss the film as sensational, the film has much to say, and the sensation is intended to moralize rather than glamorize (this boundary is never crossed). Irreversible treats horrifying, unsettling, and difficult themes with horrifying, unsettling, and difficult filmmaking techniques, and in this regard Gaspar Noé is an artist of the highest caliber. Though I can't recommend it to the faint of heart, Irreversible is one of the most important and life-changing films of recent years.

Irreversible (2002)
d/w: Gaspar Noé
(Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel)
10/10

Movie Review: The Piano Teacher (2001)

Austrian director Michael Haneke once said, "[My films] are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus." Certainly, nothing comes easy in a Haneke film. Exposition is rarely offered, and things usually taken for granted such as division between "good" characters and "bad" are here denied. In place of honest monologues and meaningfully edited action, Haneke substitutes silence, well-placed, drawn-out moments of silence during intervals where conventional filmmakers would offer answers. The placement and duration of these pauses is sufficient to require an involved viewer to begin deciding what questions he or she needs resolved and, in the process, to begin trying to solve them. Whereas the concise speed of conventional films offers no opportunities for pondering until after the end credits have begun to roll, Haneke's films are equal parts puzzling presentation and ponderous pausing. While perhaps tedious to some, the movies of Michael Haneke effectively cement themselves in the minds of their viewers.

The titular character of La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher or The Piano Player) is Erika Kohut, a woman of uncertain quality. Played by Isabelle Huppert with no cosmetic frills, she is a grim, pale, stony woman, her hair, clothing, and face tightly constrictive. In the movie's opening scene, she is presented sympathetically as a late middle aged, depressed adult still living under the domineering presence of a manipulative, aggressive mother (Annie Girardot). In subsequent scenes, however, the film presents a thoroughly cold and unlikable side of her as she completes a day of work as a piano instructor at a Viennese conservatory. Grilling her teenage students, she is unyielding, negative, and demanding, insulting her pupils for failing to grasp what she, as a skilled, lifelong pianist, has come to appreciate.

Erika's mother, in her typical way of seeding virulent ideas in seemingly offhand, tangential remarks, suggests one reason for Erika's frigid approach toward her students: jealousy of competition. Suggesting that Erika should prevent her insecure student Anna Schober from becoming too competent in Schubert lest she step on Erika's toes as the modern master of the composer's complex works, the mother reveals that Erika's ultimate desire is not to teach but to do. Despite her accomplishments as a specialist of Schubert, Erika has never succeeded as a concert pianist. Her career as a teacher is a backup plan, a second choice, and it puts her in the awkward position of wanting to teach her students well, but not wanting to teach them well enough that they might prevent her from achieving her ultimate dream.

This frustrating fantasy--that despite her age she might still one day succeed as a professional musician--continually fueled by her mother's insistence, drives Erika to commit a diabolical act. Frustrated by Anna's growing success days before a school recital that, according to the mother, just may have important people in the audience, Erika secretly slips glass shards into Anna's coat pocket. When Anna shoves her hand into them, her fingers--and her possible career as a pianist--are destroyed. Erika does what any teacher must do; in order to allow Anna's fellow musicians the opportunity to perform in the recital, Erika fills her position as an understudy. And so the culmination of her irrational jealousy results in an awkward fulfillment of her desires: she will get to perform in front of these speculative "important people" in the audience, but she will be doing so as a fortysomething woman at a school recital with teenagers. What seems like a worthwhile fantasy is sometimes a miserable reality.

And that's the theme of this disturbing film: the crucial differences between positive expectations and their realistic fulfillment. Erika is, it's assumed a virgin. Despite her stern and serious appearance, however, she possesses the sexual desire of a hormonal adolescent. After work she visits sex shops in order to watch graphic pornography in the private booths, sniffing the semen-soaked tissues from the wastebasket. At night, she prowls about drive-in movie theater lots, hoping to find couples making love in back seats of cars. Her responses to sexual arousal are natural and bodily, but wholly abnormal: sexual stimulation causes her to cough, to urinate, to vomit, and to bleed. Her orgasms are physical eruptions and releases, yet they are far removed from normal sexual responses and instead are the symptoms of illness and injury. (To be fair, however, the bleeding is not spontaneous but a direct result of her having cut her labia with a razor blade in the bathtub.)

Her sexual fantasies are likewise unconventional. When she meets Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), a young, charismatic engineering student who shares a similar skill in and passion for Schubert, Erika sees an opportunity to express her sexual self honestly. Walter is handsome, healthy, active, and masculine. An intelligent, practical, ambitious charmer, he is also perhaps the first attractive man to ever openly express an interest in Erika. She resists his desire to be a typical, dominant, male lover, however, and eventually confesses to him her real sexual needs in a lengthy handwritten letter detailing physical abuse, bondage, submission, humiliation, helplessness, and rape. She reveals a box full of ropes and tools she has collected for these purposes. She doesn't want tenderness, she wants to be brutally subjected to physical sensations. She wants to be overpowered by sexuality. She wants a tactile, unavoidable manifestation of the psychological, subversive control that her mother exerts over her everyday. Oddly, though she wants to be dominated, she details these desires in perfectly regimented instructions and rules. The constraints of wanting a specific fantasy fulfilled--in other words, needing to communicate this fantasy to another person and direct that person like an actor--are at odds with the submissive, spontaneous, uncontrollable nature of the fantasy. Whereas an unspoken aspect of any fantasy is that it plays itself out naturally without being discussed and artificially created beforehand, the specific, unusual desires of her fantasy, cultivated over several decades, could never possibly happen without some prior rendering of the fantasy as rehearsed playacting.

Furthermore, Walter is disgusted. He doesn't want to be told what to do. He prefers his sex life to be unscripted and unregulated. He also is into traditional lovemaking, not loud, violent rape. He rejects her. She relents and persists, realizing that her honesty may have been to abrupt and startling and offering him an opportunity to do whatever he wants to do with her. Having bared her soul to someone, she doesn't want to lose perhaps her last opportunity for a sexual, mutual relationship. He, however, having learned more secrets about her than most people ever learn about another, cannot shake the reminders of what he deems disgusting and inhuman. Though she assures him that the specific circumstances of anyone's desires for love and sex are ultimately "banal" trivialities, his new knowledge that she is a sexual, biological, desperate creature presents an unconquerable challenge to his fantasy of her as a talented, controlled, sensible mentor. How can he respect her when she's titillated by being disrespected? And why would he want to have sex with anyone he doesn't respect?

A mark of happiness and a guarantee of success is an ability to convince ourselves that our fantasies and reality bear any resemblance. The Piano Teacher is a tragedy for Erika because it reveals her inability to form realistic, achievable fantasies and her recognition that when these fantasies come as close to being true as possible, they are never as good as she imagined they might be. The climax of The Piano Teacher is a disturbing and enigmatic depiction of this unfortunate fact. Though Erika convincingly informs Walter that she has no feelings, this is a lie, a mere fantasy that she wishes were true about herself. Though she keeps her emotions bound up and hidden, they are unleashed when she reveals her desires to Walter. The secret box under her bed that holds her sexual torture devices may as well be a Pandora's Box, for its opening chisels at her rigid exterior and reveals a frantic flurry of emotions beneath. She is desperate to be touched, to be loved, to be recognized, to be appreciated. In the bed that she shares with her mother, she frantically kisses, hugs, and touches her in a moment of strange incest that results in the mother beating her back and screaming at her. She pursues Walter, apologizes, berates herself, and offers him whatever he wants, but during an act of relatively normal sex, she orgasmically vomits. Misinterpreting her bodily reaction to his penis as the ultimate rejection of his manhood, he offers her insults and disgust. Finally, on the same night that her insane father dies in an asylum, a confused Walter forces his way into her apartment and offers her everything she wants.

Angry, frustrated, and confused, Walter accuses Erika of being a pervert. His frustration is genuine, but it also seems forcibly mustered, as though he's trying to play the role of an angry man. When he suddenly slaps her, he asks, "Not as you imagined, huh?" When her mother enters and tries to phone the police, he reacts instinctively and aggressively, throwing her in the bedroom, locking her up, and telling her off in a way that Erika must have wanted to do for decades. "'Forget your mother.' We have time. We have all night," he says. Then he pauses, closing his eyes and thinking. "Let's pick up where we left off," he says pointing to the place by the door where he slapped her. It's as though he's rehearsing, attempting to build a believable character while dealing with bad lines, forgotten actions, and interruptions. "Is this really what you imagined?" he pleads with her, and she shakes her head for an ambiguous reason--does she no longer want it or does she want it differently? She seems flustered and disappointed, and at one point it almost looks as though she rolls her eyes. It's not her job to direct him once the fantasy begins; he should be a better actor. Quoting her erotic confession, he hits her about the face. He beats and kicks her. She bleeds. She gives him a solid command to avoid hitting in the face and hands. But when she tells him to please stop, the request comes from a different voice. In her letter it predicted that she would say no and insisted that if she did say no, it meant that he should only be more aggressive. He is, but then he stops himself. He's not having fun, she doesn't appear to be having fun, and he's not even certain he's doing anything right.

He excuses himself to the kitchen to collect himself and drink a glass of water. Perhaps he takes off the costume at this point; perhaps he wishes to end the play. When he brings her back a glass of water, he sees her attempting to unlock her mother. Not part of the script, he reacts suddenly, smashing the glass and hitting her. Why is she trying to get him in trouble? Is she merely improvising, or is she actually trying to avoid his rape? When he responds violently, is it merely to protect his criminal self, or is he just trying to stick to the script? Is he raping her or not? Explaining that he's not enjoying the script and that it's time for him to play by his own rules, he rolls on top of her and begins to have sex with her in a tender, conventional, missionary position. He kisses her face, eyes, and mouth, though she doesn't kiss back. Her face is expressionless. She tells him to stop, but he keeps going. Finally, responding to her cold behavior, he deviates fully from the script, asking "Are you trying to tell me I should go?" She says nothing. He orgasms and then selfishly leaves.

They don't call the police. Maybe calling the police, given the evidence of the letter, would be ineffectual. Maybe they don't call the police because he didn't truly commit a crime. Maybe they're just scared. The next day, at the recital, Erika seems rather composed despite her bruised face. She brings a kitchen knife in her purse, and when Walter treats her as though nothing positive or negative had ever happened between them, she thrusts the knife into her own chest and exits the building into the night. Maybe she planned to kill him. Maybe she always planned to kill herself. The film closes without answering this question.

But it also leaves a host of other questions unresolved. The climactic sex act was undeniably a "rape," but was it nonconsensual, and if it was, then was it nonconsensual from the beginning or only at the point when Walter deviated from the script? Is there such a thing as consensual rape? Was it inevitable that Walter would leave Erika after conquering her sexually, and are the specifics of the sex thus irrelevant in regard to the fact that Walter was a teenage boy only after sex whereas Erika was after a deeper relationship? Does Erika kill herself because Walter rapes her, or does she kill herself because he leaves her and moves on? Or does she kill herself because she can no longer deal with having her emotions and desires exposed? Or does she kill herself out of embarrassment? Or does she kill herself because she realizes that what she wants and needs from life will always be unattainable? Does she even kill herself, or is it merely a showy display of masochism, an attempt to feel something near her heart despite truly being able to feel anything in her heart? Is she telling the truth when she says that she has no feelings? Can any relationship based on preset, unequal roles of domination and submission truly reach a level of loving equality outside of sex? Is sex really just a banal aspect of a broader love? Is Walter's statement after the rape that "love isn't everything" what truly kills her? And what role have Erika's domineering mother and absent yet important insane father played in her psychological development?

The Piano Teacher, which is Haneke's only theatrical film to date that was not based on his own original story (it is based on a novel by feminist Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, who later won the Nobel Prize in 2004), is the perfect representative of his "cinema of insistent questions." Anyone who watches the film must decide for him or herself what its intentions are. Having called it a perfect representative of a thought-provoking screenplay, however, I must admit that The Piano Teacher is not enjoyable film to watch. There are numerous scenes of what can only be described as sexual horror compounded with monstrous levels of psychological ugliness. Isabelle Huppert is uniform and convincing in her portrayal, but her character is inhuman and possibly psychotic, impossible to relate to on any emotional or personal level. While the film is fascinating and gripping, its outcome is bleak and discomforting, and whether or not a normal viewer has anything to learn from its psychology is questionable. The Piano Teacher is a remarkable film, but not a recommendable one.

The Piano Teacher (2001)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Magimel)
6/10