The Piano Teacher Movie poster

The Piano Teacher (French: La Pianiste) is a 2001 film written and directed by Michael Haneke, starring Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel. The film is based on the novel The Piano Teacher, by Elfriede Jelinek, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a piano professor at a Vienna music conservatory. Although already in her forties, she still lives in an apartment with her domineering mother (Annie Girardot); her father is a long-standing resident in a lunatic asylum.
The audience is gradually shown truths about Erika's private life. Behind her assured façade, she is a woman whose sexual repression verges into full-fledged desperation and is manifested in a long list of paraphilias, including (but by no means limited to) voyeurism and sadomasochistic fetishes such as sexual self-mutilation.When Erika meets Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), a charming 17-year-old engineering student from a bourgeois background, a mutual obsession develops. Even though she initially attempts to prevent consistent contact and even tries to undermine his application to the conservatory, he eventually becomes her pupil. Like her, he appreciates and is a gifted interpreter of Schumann and Schubert
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