After seeing The Piano Teacher, knowing what to make of it proves a mental challenge, which incidentally go's hand in hand with the films subject matter. It is about mentally challenged people. At the centre a piano teacher, Erika (Isabelle Huppert). A middle aged woman who has devoted her life to a talent, and subsequently seems to be psychologically flawed and void of some fundamental human values and abilities. Primarily the ability to understand and harness her own emotions, particularly her sexual urges, which seem to have built up, accumulated to a point of incomprehensibility. She also still shares a bed with her mother. I have often wondered that those who apply themselves wholly to a special gift or talent can somehow cause an imbalance within themselves through their constant search and struggle. Vincent van Gough and Michael Jackson are two examples that come to mind. Both immensely talented artist, but combined with a mixture of wrong circumstances have come through the thick of it just too badly bruised. And where they have excelled in their talent, lack some fundamental stability to be settled in more common practices. Erika is a partial victim of circumstance and genetics. An overbearing mother, and speculation of her father in a mental asylum, would be at the height of this. Personal identity, sexual psychosis, frustration and obsession are the key themes of the film. The camera follows Erika from the formal teaching of her piano lessons, to the explorations and indulgence of darker places and environments, physically as well as psychologically. When a new pupil Walter (Benoît Magimel), both handsome and cultured pursues her erotically, her chemical imbalance turns to overdrive, and Erika grasps the opportunity to unleash her suppression of urges burning within. The climax is a revelation of unsettling ambiguity and wonder which left me itching with clueless irritation, but with enough questions to conclude my own possible answers.
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