The piano player (film)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title The piano player
Original title La Pianiste
Country of production Austria , Germany , France , Poland
original language French
Publishing year 2001
length 131 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Michael Haneke
script Michael Haneke
production Yvon Crenn ,
Christine Gozlan ,
Veit Heiduschka ,
Michael Katz
music Francis Haines
camera Christian Berger
cut Nadine Muse ,
Monika Willi
occupation

The Piano Player is a feature film by the Austrian director Michael Haneke from 2001 and is based on the novel of the same name by Elfriede Jelinek .

With 2.5 million moviegoers, including around 700,000 in France, the film is the most successful production with Austrian participation in recent years. It was released on DVD as part of the edition “ The Austrian Film ”.

action

Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory . She is in her late 30s and still lives with her mother. She shares the former parental marriage bed with her. In this tight grip, Erika is almost completely under maternal control; she has no privacy as the room she lives in cannot be locked and is therefore subject to constant control by her mother. This barely tolerates social contact. She destroys her daughter's clothes when she thinks she comes home late. Both of them become violent in the disputes.

However, Erika secretly takes liberties. So she visits a peepshow booth and smells discarded paper towels. In addition, she injures herself in the intimate area in the bathroom. When she watches a couple having sex in a drive-in theater, the man spots her while she urinates next to the car. On arrival at home, she is slapped by her mother, who says that her child was with a colleague from the Vienna Conservatory because the father died that day.

In addition to her work as a piano teacher, Erika gives house concerts. Her mother is suspicious of too talented students and wants her daughter to continue her career, which she takes very good care of. At one of the house concerts Erika met the "Schwachstrom" student Walter Klemmer, who also played the piano and fell in love with Erika.

Walter applies to the Conservatory for Erika's class and is accepted despite her negative vote. Meanwhile, they are rehearsing for a school concert. On the day of the dress rehearsal, one of Erika's students is very scared of performance, which is why Walter takes care of the student. During the rehearsal, Erika goes out, wraps a water glass in a cloth in the changing room and crushes it. She makes sure that there are sharp-edged splinters that she puts in the student's coat pocket. The girl cuts her hand while putting on her coat and screams. While teacher and pupil are running together, Erika instructs Walter to play protector: she cannot see blood herself. Erika apparently calmly goes up one floor and urinates in the school toilet.

Klemmer follows her and takes her out of the cabin. At first there are stormy gestures of excitement, but Erika breaks off again and again and tries to silence Walter and keep him at a distance. Ultimately, the sexual acts are broken off and Walter leaves the room unsatisfied, but with Erika's assurance that she will send him instructions for future meetings.

In the next piano lesson with Klemmer, Erika behaves as if nothing had happened. She only criticizes the performance of her student on the piano. At the end of the lesson, she hands him a sealed letter. Walter suggests that they spend the weekend together. Erika shrinks from that. Klemmer follows her on the way home and catches up with her in the stairwell. When he follows her into the apartment, the mother is not happy about the uninvited guest. Erika claims that she still has to discuss something with her student and goes to her room with him. Because it cannot be locked, the two push the sideboard in front of the door. The mother gets drunk out of anger and helplessness.

Meanwhile, Erika asks Klemmer to read the letter. In this envelope are Erika's most secret wishes. She writes that Klemmer should beat, gag , yell at and rape her. "When I beg, then just pretend that you want to do it, in reality please pull the shackles even tighter, even tighter, and pull the strap by at least 2-3 holes, the more, the more I prefer it, tighter together, and also stuff my old nylons, which will be ready, into my mouth as tightly as possible and gag me so ingeniously that I can't make the slightest sound. ”She shows him hers in the hiding place stored utensils. Klemmer did not imagine it to be like that; he runs out of the apartment. Erika gets along with her mother in the marriage bed.

The next day Erika followed Walter to his ice hockey training, and they retired to the cleaning ladies' storeroom. She apologizes. It happens that Erika lies on the floor and has oral sex with Walter, who is above her. But then Erika has to vomit, and an argument ensues between the two, from which Erika then flees.

In the middle of the night, Klemmer knocks on her door and demands that it open for him. As soon as she opens the door, he storms into her apartment, slaps Erika, rams her fist in her stomach and kicks her when she doubles on the floor. The mother wants to call the police, but Klemmer pushes her back into the bedroom and locks her up. He also quotes from the letter. He then drinks a glass of water in the kitchen. Upon his return, he notices Erika talking to her mother through the door and gets angry. He then raped Erika. Then he asks about her well-being, to which she can only give monosyllabic answers.

The next day, Erika goes to the student concert armed with a kitchen knife, she is supposed to replace the student at the piano. She discovers Klemmer in the midst of a group of happy fellow students and watches him flirt with a girl. Klemmer greets Erika with "Frau Professorin" as if nothing had happened. Now she takes the knife out of her handbag, stabs herself dispassionately in the shoulder and leaves the building bleeding.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack includes works by Frédéric Chopin , Joseph Haydn , Ludwig van Beethoven , Sergei Rachmaninow , Johann Sebastian Bach and Franz Schubert .

Reviews

The Rotten Tomatoes review collection lists 88 reviews, 73 percent of which are positive. The average rating is 7 out of 10 points.

  • “The film begins as a psychological drama, but loses its power of persuasion when the pianist, played extremely impressively by Isabelle Huppert, reveals her repressed sides. The dense staging, which focuses on the essentials, works with provocative gaps and many exciting subplots, under which the gender issue is somewhat overweighted. " ( Film-dienst )
  • “Far from being an exciting sex show, 'The Piano Player' has the feel of a clinical case study that is raised to the subject of an aesthetic and philosophical discourse. Visually, Mr. Haneke is a cool, pedantic formalist who prefers elegant camera positions in which the camera remains stationary. The icy authority with which the film manipulates our expectations is reminiscent of its infamous 1997 film ' Funny Games ' ... ” ( New York Times )
  • “The three-time award-winning film 'Die Klavierspielerin' by Michael Haneke in Cannes 2001 is a congenial adaptation of the novel by Elfriede Jelinek. Haneke's pictures are as disturbing as Jelinek's language. Without emotion, like a researcher, he lets us participate in the neurotic goings-on of his heroine until it hurts. " ( Stern )

The video version of the film has been cut by about 5 minutes. The "excruciatingly long shots" contained in the theatrical version cannot develop their effects in the video version and deprive the film of "its essential statements".

Awards

literature

  • Elfriede Jelinek: The piano player . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 1983 (first print)
  • Elfriede Jelinek: The piano player . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 1986, ISBN 3-499-15812-4 .
  • Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek: The piano player: script, conversations, essays. Vienna: special number, 2001, ISBN 3-85449-191-3 .
  • Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek: La pianiste: scénario d'après le roman de Elfriede Jelinek. Cahiers du cinéma, Paris 2001. ISBN 2-86642-318-6 (French edition)
  • Marianne Springer-Kremser and Peter Schuster: The Piano Player - Borderline Personality Disorders . In: Stephan Doering, Heidi Möller (eds.): Frankenstein and Belle de Jour - 30 film characters and their mental disorders . Springer Medizin Verlag, Heidelberg 2008, pp. 282-293, ISBN 978-3-540-76879-1 .

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ allocine.fr section "Bach et Chopin sur la bande originale" (French)
  2. ^ The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) (2001). In: Rotten Tomatoes . Retrieved on August 23, 2020 (English).
  3. ↑ cf. Film review in the film service 20/2001
  4. ↑ cf. Holden, Stephen: Film Review: Kinky and Cruel Goings-On in the Conservatory . In: New York Times, March 29, 2002
  5. ↑ cf. With the knife in the soul . In: Stern, October 11, 2001, Magazin Film, p. 207
  6. ↑ Review by Andreas Thomas at: filmrezension.de