FILM SCREENING II | ELFRIEDE JELINEK | Michael Haneke: THE PIANO TEACHER / LA PIANISTE

2001, 131 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Magimel, and Annie Girardot.

Erika is a piano teacher at a prestigious music school in Vienna who still lives with her overprotective and controlling mother. Lonely and alienated, Erika finds solace by visiting sex shops and experimenting with masochism. At a recital, she befriends Walter, a handsome young man, with whom she begins an illicit affair. As Erika slowly drifts closer to the brink of emotional disorder, she uses the love-stricken Walter to explore her darkest sado-masochistic fantasies.

“Published in 1983, [Jelinek’s] novel would seem impossible to film given its claustrophobic prose and the uncompromising quality of its vision, an unholy match of Baudelairean spleen and the sort of radical feminism not meant for the faint of heart. In all likelihood it was [its] take-no-prisoners quality…that first caught the attention of Haneke…. At once an emotional thriller and a domestic horror movie, [the film is] a woman’s picture with a vengeance, in which the bloodletting is kept to a minimum, and ends up all the more powerful and profound for it.” –Manohla Dargis, LA WEEKLY

For tickets and information go to www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

VENUE
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