Directed by Michael Haneke • 2001 • France
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Magimel
In this riveting study of the dynamics of control, Academy Award–winning director Michael Haneke takes on Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial 1983 novel about perverse female sexuality and the world of classical music. Haneke finds his match in Isabelle Huppert, who delivers an icy but quietly seething performance as Erika, a piano professor at a Viennese conservatory who lives with her mother in a claustrophobically codependent relationship. Severely repressed, she satisfies her masochistic urges only voyeuristically until she meets Walter (Benoît Magimel), a student whose desire for Erika leads to a destructive infatuation that upsets the careful equilibrium of her life. A critical breakthrough for Haneke, THE PIANO TEACHER—which won the Grand Prix as well as dual acting awards for its stars at Cannes—is a formalist masterwork that remains a shocking sensation.
Up Next in Directed by Michael Haneke
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Benny’s Video
Directed by Michael Haneke • 1992 • Austria
Starring Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, Ulrich MüheMichael Haneke turns the unflinching gaze of the camera back on itself in this provocative, profoundly disturbing study of emotional disconnection in the age of mass-media saturation. Benny (a frighteni...
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The Castle
Directed by Michael Haneke • 1997 • Austria
Michael Haneke's adaptation of Franz Kafka's absurdist novel follows a land surveyor as he struggles with the increasingly difficult and bureaucratic practices of the local authorities.
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The Seventh Continent
Directed by Michael Haneke • 1989 • Austria
Starring Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, Leni TanzerThe day-to-day routines of a seemingly ordinary Austrian family begin to take on a sinister complexion in Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie giving way to shocking self-destruction. I...
