06.11.24, 20:30, La Pianiste (2001)

Sharpen your ears and voice your desires, Kinoautomat unpacks with a toxic quatre-mains where fantasy and reality are cool lovers.

In La Pianiste, Michael Haneke builds on the critical power plays of his earlier films with a psychosexual drama that tests the limits of the permissible. With delicate detachment, Isabelle Huppert plays Erika, a piano teacher whose success at the Vienna conservatory contrasts sharply with the disruption within her personal life. Living with her domineering mother and estranged from her surroundings, she is weighed down by sexual blocks. Everything changes, however, when she takes on young Walter as a student. What begins as a platonic affair soon takes on sadomasochistic proportions. Mistress and student thus become increasingly lost in the hall of mirrors of their projections.

Our guest speaker on duty examines these études into romantic power relations on the basis of her own artistic practice. Platitudes about love and attraction often see the object of desire as the path to personal fulfilment, but intrinsic power relations that entail similar dependence are left out of the equation.

This film will be introduced by filmmaker Cato Catteeuw and preceded by her short film Burn (2023).