Today, I'll be staying home. A day's break after going out fervidly the last 4 days of the week. Jo has left for Sdyney on a vacation and I'll be missing her. To cheer myself up, I'll just think of all the wonderful stuff she'll be bringing back once she returns. hehe. It's been a while since I wrote a review...so I just did. On acclaimed film maker, Michael Haneke's adaptation of The Piano Teacher, La Pianiste.

La Pianiste disturbs but impresses with its honest take on the duality of human nature.

La Pianiste(The Piano Teacher) was a huge winner at the 2001 Cannes film festival bagging 3 major awards, Best Female Performance, Best Male Performance and The Grand Jury Prize putting the french and austrian production in high esteem with critics and audiences alike. About a little over a year later(and why am i not surprized), La Pianiste makes its way here almost without a bang or a whisper via a dimunitive article in the Life section of The Straits Times.(so maybe let's wait another year till this year's Cannes winners arrive) I got a convenient sms from one of my bestfriends Jia who asked me if I wanted to go catch it at the Alliance Franchaise with a limited screen run of two nights(26th and 27th of June). Eileen came along for the ride too.

La Pianiste revolves around the tale of a middle aged piano professor, Erika Kohut(Isabelle Huppert), who is torn between her talent, and passion for music as well as her piano playing, and her baser desires of the flesh. She is uptight, strict, cultured, regal and even snobbish with her status as a famous piano teacher who only teaches exclusively talented students. And yet when she gets away from the academy, her students and her piano, she is addicted to watching pornography and peeping on copulating couples at a drive-in. She also has a love-hate relationship with her mother. Enter a younger, dashing man, Walter Klemmer(Benoit Magimel) who is enamoured with her talent, her love for music and her respectable demeanour. He pursues her while under her tutorship for a masters programme and presents an opportunity for her to live out her deepest, darkest desires.

The lead character Erika is a brutally honest look at an individual who is tugged by two extremities, the aspirations of a cultured mind and the dishonourable craving for sado-masochism and porn sex. Under the calm and cold demeanour, is a self-loathing woman who doesn't know how to come to terms with her own duality resulting in intense pain and grief. Isabelle's longing for a sado-masochistic encounter runs deeper than just mere sexual gratification. Being the one whose career includes executing commands to students constantly , she longs to surrender to instruction and be subjected to severe beatings due to the hatred she has toward herself. Kudos to best actress, Isabelle Huppert, who was able to express Erika's iron strength as a piano instructor and her complete vulnerability when the character reaches breaking point. Benoit Magimel also gave a good performance as Walter, the young cad who is infectuated with her. A hopeless charmer and romantic at first, he too gets embroiled in confusion and hurt when Isabelle shows him her inner self which consequently opens up a part of him he never thought could've existed in his own nature.

There is some fancy piano playing in the film also. The camera work is competent for an independent production but a word of warning, the overhead microphone on the robopole keeps peeking from the top of several scenes and in some extreme cases, the whole mike can be seen hanging down above the actors. That encouraged a couple of chuckles from the audience and the illusion gets somewhat broken but the intensity of the film's plot and the interaction between the characters more than makes up for that little mistake. La Pianiste shows the fine line between self respect and hatred, love and peversity, culture and animalistic human nature. And how when that line is blurred, an individual can be pushed to unimaginable thoughts and deeds.

Man, is this review long. Sorry about all that, but it's one of the few films this year that compels me to ponder so much. This is definitely one movie to try and get a hold of. If you could get the dvd, vcd or video that'd be great but it might be a little difficult because foreign independent productions are a rare stock here and moreover the film is a little more sexually explicit than the usual fare we get in the local theatres. But you can try looking around or if you really want to watch it, place a personal order with a dvd dealer. This is one movie so realistically honest, it might haunt you and make you ponder about your own dualities.