The Piano Teacher - 4

I wanted to like this film. I enjoyed Michael Haneke's most recent film Cache, and Paul says good things about Funny Games, Benny's Video is apparently mediocre. I play the piano and enjoy films that utilize it as part of the story. It seemed to be going well. Erika seems to be a relatively normal women who is on the faculty at a music college. She still lives with her mother, who is rather nosy and they argue and fight. Not enough to do any horrible damage to the relationship and they are able to reconcile, or at least tolerate, petty differences. A young man, Walter, meets her at a recital and he decides to pursue her. And they have an interesting conversation about Adorno's theory of music. Applying to be a student in her class, and generally being impressive. The film then takes a sharp turn, and the audience discovers that she is in fact a control freak. This manifest itself most in her sex life and she tries to convince Walter to beat her up as part of her fantasy. This steady decline in her ability to suppress here urges leads her to become a maniacal and evil bitch (trust me, bitch is the right word). In the end, she comes up against reality, and her fantasies are shown for what they are- only in her mind. Having seen some of the extra features the film makes a little more sense. The distinction between seduction and love is an interesting one and Erika thinks the later is driven by control. The other factor is that Haneke's work focuses on cultural critique, which means he may be pointing out the depravity of the world we live in behind closed doors in more universal terms. This seems like too much background knowledge for a general audience, so film theory fans (of which I consider myself a little more than a spectator, but not a player) can love this film while the rest of us just get disturbed. I'll leave it to Paul (I suspect he disagrees) in the comments to make an argument for why this film is worth watching.