Rating: 
Summary: A Film That Will Make You Scratch Your Seat...
Review: It's been nearly a year since I saw 'The Piano Teacher', but I still have the images in my mind, still sharp, still intense, still somewhat disturbing. But, I like it that way. Heineke's film, is definitely one of the biggest rises in French film industry. And I agree with the other reviewers, that the film's unknownness is directly related to its unconventional tension, which literally made me scratch my seat in the theater.The film focuses on Isabelle Huppert's sexual and social psychosis, and her isolation from the rest of the society. During the course of the movie, Huppert goes through a couple of sexual explosions, which are not at a pleasing nor satisfying level at all, but rather resulting in discontent and hatred among her and her partner, who is the student she gives piano lessons to. This after-scene suffices for you to feel odd. Her sexual inmaturity, gives rise to her weird behavior during daily life. Her seclusion of her own mother, that precedes her real harrassment of her, is a good example of this idea. This film involves severe tension, sexual and social violence. Beware of this fact before you purchase the film. It's a brilliant film, but for some people. Some may not like the content. Great production by Heineke, great acting by Isabelle Hupport!
Rating: 
Summary: repugnant at best
Review: Well-acted for the most part, it was a relief to turn this movie off. The tension and psychosis which built but never held interest, created empathy, or suspended self, finally erupted into a confusing condonning of rape. This is one of those ugly movies that defiles the consciousness of its viewers with no higher purpose - artistic or philosophic. Your time would be better spent watching lint form in the dryer.
Rating:
Summary: From A Music Teacher!
Review: This film is outstanding, but I can't imagine the genral public liking this movie. I'm in the classical music world and understand the music conservatory life. All the acting is wonderful. I would say not to watch this movie if you really don't know the music world and not like kinky stuff. I do understand why some people get bord with this. But to me I can really feel how my life would be over if my teacher put glass in my coat pocket to injure my hands so I'll never play again! That was the most terrible part for me to watch!
Trust your own judgement. If you don't like the plot, the music is beautiful and they use great musicians.
Rating:
Summary: Pretentious bore
Review: Ok. So Isabelle Huppert was brave in doing some of the things she does in this. So what?
The movie is a pretentious bore which never grabs the viewer. It's just a series of nasty and kinky scenes which ultimately go nowhere. The Isabelle Huppert character is a psychopath, but incredibly she is an uninteresting one.
A truly disappointing movie.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of twisted cinema
Review: When I first heard about Michael Haneke's "The Piano Teacher", about a sexually repressed instructor at the Vienna Conservatory, I thought it was exactly the kind of movie I didn't want to see. In a world awash in pop music, South Park and Britney videos, how could a film about the stultifyingly uptight classical music world have *any* relevance for a post-modern, post-everything film buff (even if he is American?) Didn't Bergman tread this ground 40 years ago? Didn't Bunuel make savage fun of the hypocrisy of bourgeois sexual respectability in "Belle de Jour" (1966)? Wasn't Haneke a little behind the times? Walking - or I should say staggering - out of the theater 2.5 hours later, I was humbled by the scope of Haneke's and Huppert's achievement. Rarely have I seen a film both so clear-eyed about sexual psychosis and yet so compassionate as well. Isabelle Huppert, who probably wasn't nominated for an Oscar only because the film can be so off-putting to some, gives what can only be described as an intense performance. Her clenched face and the darting movements of her eyes reveal more about her character - her inner rage, her self-hatred - than most actors can achieve with sheets and sheets of dialouge. That's the essence of the film, everything is very formally *controlled* - so that when violence, self-inflicted or otherwise, breaks out, it is startling because it emerges from such as civilized veneer. If the point of the film were to demonstrate the High Culture spiritually deforms those who engage in it (and I don't think it does), the film would have minimal interest. High culture has been on the defensive so long, it doesn't need to be blamed for driving Isabelle Huppert nuts as well. Rather the film gains its strength from watching a seriously damaged human being - damaged in ways only suggested at - construct a protective cocoon around herself that fails to protect her from troublesome feelings and desires. The film is somewhat similar to Neil Jordan's great film, "The Butcher Boy" whose protagonist uses an opposite strategy - relentless good cheer -to mask the absolute misery he's sinking into. In these two films, as well as other recent films like Noe's "I Stand Alone", Nyutten's "L'Humanite", Haneke's other recent film "Code: Unknown" and Tim Roth's "The War Room", European filmmakers are portraying contemporary Europe as a society rife with cultural and psychological malaise - along with a great uncertainty as to ability of others to ameliorate the misery that man hands to his fellow man. "The Piano Teacher" is important - essential even - not because Isabelle Huppert is asked to do things on camera few major actresses would willingly agree to. The film gets right to the dark heart of our contemporary malaise - our declining faith in the ability of culture - or anything - to ease us out of our despair and mitigate the cruelty we often see around us. The film is extremely distributing, enraging but not empty - it was the most provocative piece of cinema to be release in the US last year.
Rating:
Summary: One of the worst movies I've ever seen
Review: Despite the praise heaped on this movie, it is awful. The acting that is so ballyhooed involves lots of tense, pursed lip movements, shot in long stills with a piano playing in the background. The piano playing is really irrelevant to the plot (though of course the movie pretends otherwise). There is a lot of sick violence towards the viewer, in the form of unnecessary and crass depications of supposedly shocking and or titillating sick violence. It's a poorly conceived story bolstered by unconvincing and cheaply theatrical psychology. This is the sort of movie that shows rather than reveals. In one of the most pretentious scenes, the main character assaults her mother, with whom she shares a bed, in an almost sexual way, and this is supposed to symbolize some emotional cataclysm that is otherwise undeveloped in the movie. The central love story is thrown at the viewer, and the sources of the central character's depraved violence against self and others are suggested only in an incoherent way. This movie exemplifies what happens when a weak director tackles a complicated subject. This is not a character study, as some claim, as the main character is nothing more interesting than a fastidious and vicious psychopath. The male lead is a handsome but unexpressive face, who does an alright job of playing an obnoxious violent man hiding beneath a veneer of culture (this role might have had some interest, had it been developed). It's depressing that so many people liked this pathetic movie. `Natural Born Killers' was a better movie.
Rating: 
Summary: Music isn't always the food of love...
Review: Well, I finally got the chance to see the movie which won Isabelle Huppert Best Actress at Cannes, the movie which David Lame and his not so merry band of God Botherers tried to stop from being screened in NZ (without them having seen it). Lo, they have turned this movie into a decent sized hit as a result. THE PIANO TEACHER is actually the best SPCS publicized movie I've seen to date. Brilliantly directed by Michael Heneke, who scripted from Elfiede Jelinek's novel.Huppert plays Professor Erika Kohut; a cold, brutal, seemingly prudent piano teacher at a prestious music academy. But behind her icy facade lies an obsession with pornography and sadomasochistic sex. When a gifted young piano student (Benoit Magimel) comes under Erika's tutelage, he doesn't play to her impossibly high standards and as a result bears the brunt of her wrath but he soon finds himself falling in love with the professor who just seems to enjoy playing mind games with him. Though unknown to him Erika is gradually losing control under the influence of her domineering mother.
THE PIANO TEACHER is exceptionally well photographed with a complex structure and a brilliant perfomance from Huppert (In fact you easily forget she IS just an actress playing a part).There are some rather grim scenes including plenty of S&M, a funny drive-in theatre peeing scene and Erika putting broken glass in a girls coat pocket. I'm not sure if this will get a DVD release in NZ, but it deserves to. THE PIANO TEACHER is a masterwork that commands a wide audience, and it was probably only because of its content that it was overlooked by the Academy. One of the best movies I've seen recently.
Rating: 
Summary: A BITTER PILL COATED WITH CHOCOLATE
Review: If you enjoy watching French films that explore relationships that only exist in French films, then this movie is probably going to fill the bill. If you are horrified at having to read subtitles and think that those who do are movie elitists and only pretend to like them to appear sophisticated then this movie might be for you. I'm the second guy. As a general rule, I don't want subtitles; unless it's a war movie and the subtitles are the enemy begging for life just before our military guns them down. This movie has no war or action, in its place it has some long and painfully boring scenes peppered with some incredibly graphic and interesting exploration of sexuality. My instinctual desire was to hate this movie, but I was periodically fascinated by the relationship between the sexually psychotic Piano Teacher and her confused student...hence the 3 stars.
Bottom Line: If you've been putting off renting the artsy movie for your girlfriend (or wife) for much too long, then you might just swallow the bullet and rent this and get it over with. She gets the complicated foreign relationship story and you get some really creepy human interaction (sex).
Rating:
Summary: Happiness and pain
Review: This film is so stunning and indescribable! I have never known such joy and excitement watching a new release! Isabelle Huppert is playing one of her best roles here. She is undeniably the best actress in the world.
You just need to look at her face in this film to comprehend that. Yes, she never plays the role: she is the character, she lives the character, she feels the character.
She is deeply moving in this role. A cold, reserved, distant woman, yet so vulnerable, so tormented! The contrast between her face and her emotions is amazing, fascinating.
Loneliness, despair, madness, anger, fear, pain, uncertainty, sadness...
Her cruelty and indifference are amazing when she makes her students suffer, and her vulnerability and puerility are even more striking when it's her turn to suffer. The best scene takes place in her bedroom, when she locks herself up with her beloved, handsome student, ignoring her poor mother who is spying outside. She forces him to read a long letter, a letter that she has written and given him earlier, after the piano lesson.
The absurd thing is that she insists on hearing the letter read to her, in which she describes what she expects him to do to her, in full details.
What a more horrible thing to request from a young man you love!
First, he seems embarrassed, surprised, amused. He reads it mockingly as she watches his face inquisitively, intensely, like a child hearing a story for the first time.
He cannot believe what he's reading, the innocent young student.
No, he refuses to believe her sickening requests. She wants him to humiliate her, to degrade her, to be cruel, to torture, to hurt, strike, rape.
He cannot believe it. No, no, his beautiful and respectful teacher would not want such a thing. Besides, he loves her too much to hurt her. He shakes his head, bewildered. To prove that she is not joking, she pulls out her 'torture' tools from under her bed. She shows them to him, proudly and naively, and assures him she is serious.
As he reads further, he is shocked, angry, disappointed, disgusted, and walks out of her apartment rapidly.
Although there is no violence nor sex in this scene, the impact is heartbreaking, and leaves you breathless. The absurdity, the tension, the intimacy, the gaze, the provocation, allow you to imagine what might happen to her if he obeys her order, something even more frightening, more sadistic, more violent, more erotic, more painful, than the reality itself. It's based on the controversial novel by Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian writer. The book is even more powerful than the film. If you love the film, you absolutely have to read the book. It's like seeing the film again, and still, the impact is tremendous. There's more in-depth analysis of the characters with a striking style from the author.
The philosophical and psychological observations, the wild images are so detailed, so vivid, so absurd, so sarcastic that they make you cry and laugh at the same time.
It is a passionate book and a frightening one. All the strongest emotions are in here, with beautiful classical piano for music lovers. Classical music lovers might not agree on the beauty of this book. Classical music is supposed to elevate our mortal souls, isn't it? But here it degrades the musician's soul. How can we tolerate such a thing?
Yes, it degrades here, but it's how reality is. Classical music creates the strongest human emotions, and why not torment, suffering, degradation, the passion and pleasure of hurting and being hurt?
Rating:
Summary: Brutally Brilliant
Review: "The Piano Teacher" is one of the most affecting films I've seen in a long time. It is spare and cruel, and really has no resolution which often drives moviegoers crazy; I thought it was masterful. I saw it over a week ago and I'm still thinking about it, which speaks to how powerful it is. I won't go into plot details - you should see it yourself! But I found none of its explicitness gratuitous in the least. I thought it was a very honest portrait of the pain and anger of an individual. I wouldn't really say it was about sadomasochism, because I think it's much deeper than that. It's exposing, in a painfully raw way, the torment of a particular person. I imagine this film will resound with two kinds of people - cinephiles focused on the artistry of the film and those who identify, on a personal level, with pain. For those, Isabelle Huppert expresses more truth in the movement of an eyebrow than in just about anything else I've seen. If you know what you're getting into, "The Piano Teacher" can be an amazing experience.
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