Rating: 
Summary: Huppert magnificent in the title role of The Piano Teacher
Review: The Piano Teacher shows us a few days in the life of a disturbed woman who is both victim and victimizer. Isabelle Huppert briliantly plays the part of Erika Kohut, a middle-aged piano teacher at a music college in Vienna. Annie Giradot is no less effective as her domineering and watchful mother. The two women abuse one another physically and verbally. This relationship is long standing and comes to a crisis as the film progresses.Erika is unable to break the bonds that attach her to her mother. Instead, like a child who has never grown up, she wants to please her mother, but is driven to act out her own fantasies secretly. Her mother appears to be unaware of the deep seated repression that is consuming her daughter. What she does see is an angry, hateful person who lies to her and deceives her frequently. Erika's sexual frustration takes the form of physical and pschological self-hate. She visits porn shops to degrade herself and she mutilates her body to distract her from the intense psychological pain she suffers constantly. At school her anger takes the form of verbal abuse to her students who are unable to achieve the artistic integrity she demands. What appears to be an inflated sense of her own importance as an artist masks her frustration at being second-rate. She is not good enough to be recognized as an artist in her own right. Her hatred of herself and her inadequacy as an artist prompt her to strike out at students and colleagues alike. Into her seething cauldron of despair comes a young engineering student, Walter Klemmer, wonderfully played by Benoit Maginel, who wants to study Schubert with her. At first she refuses him, but pressure by the school to accept him forces her to work with him. The sexual tension between teacher and pupil is immediately apparent and moves forward to a collision some reviewers have likened to a bad car accident. In the end we see Erika and her student reduced to the lowest common demoninator as human beings. At first Erika is successful at dominating her young student, but the tables are turned as she becomes dependent on him. Both teacher and student are playing a zero sum game to lose. The final climax and its denoument leave Erika a wounded, broken woman. The director, Michael Haneke, elicits finely tuned performances by all the players, particularly Huppert, who is magnificent in the title role. Haneke has made this film for adults only. It is dark and disturbing from beginning to end with moments of pain and violence that are as real as anything one is likely to see on the screen. Huppert as the piano teacher has no redeeming qualities we are able to see in the short space of time covered by the film. Viewers looking for a pleasant and agreeable entertainment are urged to search elsewhere. Haneke shows us a dark side of life and he is unflinching in its portrayal.
Rating:
Summary: It stays with you for days
Review: I saw this film in Paris last October. Director, Michael Haneke has delivered an incredibly powerful film based on a controversial Austrian novel. Isabelle Huppert plays Erika, a brilliant piano professor at a college in Vienna. At work she is respected among her peers and indimidating to her students. At home, she lives with her tyrant mother (Annie Girardot). Erika and her mother have an emotionally abusive co-dependent relationship to the point where they share the same bedroom. Erika's sex life consists of eerie visits to porno shops and sadistic self-mutilation. When one of her students (Benoit Magimel) attempts to seduce her, she agrees but on HER terms. A family film this is not. There are some very disturbing scenes of emotional and physical abuse. But as difficult as the subject matter is, it does help the viewer to understand the psyche of a woman who has been denied happiness all her life. Isabelle Huppert is fantastic in a very difficult role. Her performance of the tortured Erika is the only time, I've seen a character so disturbed and cruel who I found pity in and wanted to see succeed. Forget the Oscar nominations, this is the best female performance of the year! Annie Girardot and Benoit Magimel are wonderful and very convincing in their roles as well. Lastly, the director, Michael Haneke. I've never seen any of his previous work but few directors have the ability to take complete control of my attention and keep it long after their film is over. Haneke is one of the very few who did. "La Pianiste" is a masterpiece, I recommend it to anyone who has an appreciation for European cinema.
Rating: 
Summary: Spending time with a tortured soul.
Review: I like dark movies. This movie. Is a dark movie. I may have given the review just 3 stars but it is only for the many, many questions I had at the end of the film. The one thing I have trouble understanding is the true reason of why the piano teacher (Isabelle Huppert) is the way she is. You can say out of nowhere, oh she was molested or raped when she was young or something but the movie never ever shows any flashbacks or reveal any true thoughts or opinions of her nature from her own point of view. The good job done by this movie is making the viewer a 'voyeur' into this woman's situation as she struggles with a man and her own mother. Another good reason why I liked the film is because of the ending. I just remember feeling so cold and depressed from the ending becuase it was something that I did not expect to happen at all. Personally this movie gave me a jilt and if your into ever watching foreign films than I recommend The Piano Teacher.
Rating:
Summary: THE ENEMY AT YOUR FINGERTIPS
Review: The porn in the sex shop scene of the unrated version of this DVD didn't shock me. Typical filth. What I found startling was Huppert's response to the graphic sexuality she was viewing. I felt pity for this woman. But I didn't know that my pity would turn into disdain and utter contempt for the demon inside her. This movie takes female sexual frustration to an extreme, and shows just how painful and cruel it can be. It depicts the moral degeneration of a middle aged woman who never achieved personal or professional gratification despite her immense potential as a pianist. She has turned her art into a weapon of remorse and sadistic cruelty. This is a very adult movie, which I didn't enjoy, yet I found compulsively watchable. Huppert makes all female villains in all of the movies put together look like vestal virgins. This is the type of movie that plays with the viewer's mind to the point where one feels the need to take a shower after watching it. Huppert plays the-piano-teacher-from-the-bottomless-pit to near greatness. It's a cold-blooded masterpiece of a performance.
Rating: 
Summary: Dark Romance
Review: Michael Haneke has adapted Elfriede Jelinek's novel to create this disturbing psychological portrait of piano teacher Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert). Erika's claustrophobic life is filled with strict teachings and moral hypocrisy. She is a voyeur and masochist beneath her rigid exterior. Her life becomes desperate upon meeting a new student Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel). Their relationship becomes tumultuous when it becomes increasingly clear that she is incapable of nothing like a "normal" romance.
This tragedy is at many times shocking and is likely to make you squirm in discomfort over the deranged levels of Erika's mentality. While frequently repulsed, I felt an odd sympathy for her at times over the fragility of her being and her difficulty with expressing love. The cinematography of this film is bleak. The atmosphere seems glazed with an impersonality and stark indifference equal to that of Erika's spirit. The air is bizarrely punctuated with the beauty of the many musical recitals throughout the film. Director Haneke has been much criticised for this work (it has been dismissed as pretentious). Though not for the faint of heart or morally concerned, I found it strangely moving and engaging in the way it unsettles.
Rating:
Summary: The phenomenal Isabelle Huppert
Review: Isabelle Huppert gives one of the greatest performances by an actress or actor that I have ever seen. A very dark film that is unflinching in its look at isolation and the deepest sexual desires of its characters, the plot is highly original and is supplemented with superb acting by the two leads. Certainly this is not a film for the average person, but for the filmgoer who appreciates a brutal, honest look at the more controversial psychological issues that mainstream Hollywood ignores. Things aren't always as they may seem on the surface. A+. 10/10.
Rating: 
Summary: pathetic
Review: Being a fan of Isabelle Huppert's work, I expected something more from this film. The only good thing about this film, as a matter of fact, was Huppert's performance of a woman coming undone. She lives her relatively closed (and closely monitored by her live-in mother) life as a piano teacher, and everything seems stern, put together (except for this bizarre relationship with her mother, who controls everything). And then Huppert's much-younger student begins to pursue her. By the time Huppert succumbs, she is unraveling. At the same time, the movie unravels with her.
Rating:
Summary: It is just daring madness.
Review: Forget about reading into any meaning that you think this film may offer. The director is known as just a person who likes to mess with your brains. Anyone who has seen his previous works will snap this one up in an instant. Those who enjoy this movie will likely try his other fine beverages for the head. Basically the protagonist, a sexually insane music teacher, is as mad as bag of hammers yet manages to stay somewhat somber in her profession because she fits in with the rest of the snobs, but deep inside she is totally and completely bananas with a surreal sized suppressed sexual appetite to boot. So she walks the music halls with his lemon sucking expression among all the other lemon suckers who are sucking their lemons for very different reasons to hers and for this reason nobody really knows who or what she is like. When a music student falls head over heels in love with her they set out on a voyage of absolute debauchery in every nock and cranny that they can do it in. However his love of her is totally blind to her madness. He perceives her sadomasochism as an extension of her frustration when in fact that it just another major part of her psychosis. As they delve around with each other (sometimes very violently) the viewer begins to understand that this is really just a very sick woman who needs treatment fast and yet the world she works in and her lover can not identify it. In fact many viewers will fail to grasp that the main character is crazy until the very last scene which drives the message home like a knife to the heart. This is great art-house cinema and as an insane movie ranks up there with the best of them. Some of the [] scenes are very close to X-rated material and certainly many viewers will be put off by that and the heavy amounts of violence that are sometimes on display. In short, this is a great movie about insanity, love and professionalism rolled into one. The characters in this movie are unique and the film is certainly deserving of the acclaim it received. Challenging.
Rating: 
Summary: kitsch ridiculous no content no aesthetics, boredom.
Review: This film is simply boring, as are perversions, fixations and all that stuff that in general interests solely psychoanalists,and that just because they get paid to listen to such idiotic craziness. Huppert is OK in this horrid movie, nevertheless I would not save her from the blast. All you will get is annoyed from watching this, it allows no day-after thoughts, it does not linger on within you, as nothing in the movie actually is transcending in any conceivable way.
This film is about a pianist who happens to have hell for a home. Continuing the metaphor, the musician's mother is a she-devil kind of thing. To be fair to, well, the devil devil, who's most likely a guy, the pianist's mother is no more than a crippled old lady who has raised her child in an incestuous fashion, thus promoting the multiple sexual nightmarish deeds this woman, as an adult, would engage in. Along with that, the lack of love she "suffers from" proves to be the same rejection and hatred she actually demands in others and, accordingly, delivers to everyone surrounding her.
This film is like a classical videoclip. While we enjoy some Schumann tunes we see the piano teacher wrapping herself in acts of extreme cruelty, sex that is far from enjoyable to any average individual, over the edge irrational unbuyable conversation with her mother, the pursual of something more love-like in a younger person (that is, mostly being despised and having a kick out of it). To decidedly ruin the movie is the ending, which stands as one of the worst I have ever undergone.
This film has no story line, it does not reach out to the viewer, in it there is no landmark aesthetics of any sort, no revolt against anything, no adherence to anything. It is nonesense poured into allegedly disturbing images, but why would any creator do that? Just for the sake of filming sickening stuff. That is easy to do. Tape a dog dying or a mother crying the loss of her child and you are there. But what for? And, is it cinema?
This film is garbage. The main character seeked hatred. Go a step further ahead and hate the whole thing altogether.
Rating:
Summary: Don't you get it?
Review: What a brilliant movie about incest and how it leads to the devastation of a woman. A woman who can't feel anything, who is trying desperately in every way to feel...something. And when someone presents himself to draw her out of her withered self, all she can do is re-enact her adoloscent despair. Come on, folks -- her mother tells her she's filthy, she berates her for giving in to a man -- this is Psychology 101, but brilliantly acted and compelling. Of course, she wants her student to be damaged, because she is both jealous and trying to protect her student from her overbearing parents. I doubt that I'm going to sleep well tonight.
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