I cannot say I "enjoyed" The Piano Teacher in the typical sense, but it is an extremely good film. The story is disturbing and provocative in multiple ways and Huppert's acting was outstanding. If you like movies that let you interpret the underlying thoughts and motivations behind the main characters this is for you.

I can’t say I enjoyed this movie or will ever watch it again, but it delivers what it claims to deliver. The acting, atmosphere, and music create an uncomfortable feeling throughout the whole movie, which in turn keeps the viewer engaged to see what is going to happen next.

I kept waiting for something more to happen in order to justify watching till the end. I found her cruel, desperate and thought she should be in a psychiatric hospital, not a teacher of young adults. Walter was so normal in his reactions to her. The ending was left to the viewer I suppose. Not knowing if she went to the Emergency room or she just went home.

I guess it’s some sort of French artistic production. However, the movie makes absolutely no sense. She’s obviously a psychopath and needs professional counseling. He’s just a confused young man who gets hooked up with a crazy woman. I don’t see much sense of the movie. If you Want to waste two hours of your life By all means watch this movie. I kept expecting it to get better, unfortunately, it never did.

Enjoyed it. A very cold and intellectual woman who is very repressed sexually. Usually these films are made about men, not women, so most people won't like this movie. I can't give it top marks because I felt like it was missing something.

This was one of the most unpleasant and booring things i have watched in my entire life

I always know what I'm getting into when I watch a Michael Haneke film, and it's never very pleasant. The Piano Teacher may be cold, but Haneke's main strength in this film is that he's not scared to show us anything. This is full of the Haneke long take, where he can always find stunning angles where he never has to cut in a scene. This is a beautifully disgusting study of control and repressed desire, that will leave me thinking for a while to come.

The characters, the uncomfortably long shots, and the shifting power dynamics, all make for an unflinchingly disturbing movie. It’s well acted and well made, but definitely perverse slash twisted. The end had my jaw on the floor wondering what happened and for what exact reason. Also, some really perfectly controlled shots. Also also, was freaked out to realize this was the guy from the taste of things!! What!!! There were definitely many moments when I was wondering why someone said I would love this and begged me to watch this, and what that says about me. “You speak of things as if they were yours. That’s rare” “I am a pianist, not a poet”

Well made film by Haneke, but the real highlight was Isabelle Huppert's performance.

I couldn't believe the ending. This one left me quite flabbergasted

The Piano Teacher Instructs in More Than Mere Music From the outset, Michael Haneke's 2001 psychological drama, The Piano Teacher, entraps the viewer in the tightly wound, claustrophobic internal world of Erika Kohut, a middle-aged classical piano instructor who sleeps in the same bed as her toxically overinvolved mother. By day she is a slave to the rigidly structured institution of classical music training, and by night she is tyrannised by the domineering histrionics of her emotionally manipulative mother. As the screw is wound ever more tightly on the psyche of Erika, played to perilous perfection by French actress Isabelle Huppert, her repressed erotic impulses take a decidedly dark turn, leaking out as voyeurism, self-harm, and a predilection for erotic urination. When Erika is seduced by her much younger piano student, Walter Klemmer, played by a young Benoît Magimel in all his cleft-chinned, chiselled glory, her suppressed urges erupt into unabated sadomasochistic manoeuvrings that are at once bleakly menacing and saddeningly pitiful. Both actors won the Cannes Grand Prix for their performances. Magimel's Walter is as disturbing in his impatient, wanton physicality as Huppert is in her glacially ominous stillness. If Magimel is the wildcat ready to pounce, she is the cold-blooded crocodile calculatedly eying its prey. As their erotic dance descends into perversion, Erika's mind unravels, and a series of deeply disquieting, hard-to-watch moments reveal just how unhinged she is beneath those still waters. As the saying goes, 'It's the quiet ones you have to watch'. Adapted by Haneke from Elfriede Jelinek's novel of the same name, the film is as rigidly structured and tautly directed as Erika's confined world. Windows, doors, bars and elevators hem the title character into her stiflingly claustrophobic matriarchal enclave whilst sharp, cold monumental architecture dwarfs her in her patriarchal, institutional preserve. Yet, oddly, Erika's perverse sexual rebellion finds ways to refute them both. She engages in intimate self-mutilation to spite her mother's insidious sexual repression and commits unseemly licentious acts in the hallowed halls of the Vienna Conservatory as an act of desecration. As the story seesaws the tightrope between unbearably buttoned-down inhibition and a veritable convulsion of miscreant behaviour, the director skilfully transports us from distant viewer to empathic voyeur. When she is suffocating in her minuscule, tightly wound world, we are gasping for air, and when she is debasing herself on tile floors we, like shameful peeping toms, want to look away, but cannot. Frame-within-a-frame compositions entrap us in Erika's world while painfully long takes on Huppert's face, a portrait of conflict, have us palpitating with every indiscernible quiver. As Haneke expertly peels away the layers of Erika's repression, at no point does he shy away from her transgressive and taboo expressions of sexual liberation. Rather, he takes us along with every unrelentingly cruel and carnally depraved moment, daring us to cast the first stone of judgment.

what if your beautiful piano teacher is still immature at her age ? If i were you boy I will fucking love her

This film is very good 👍🏼

Masochism. Depression. Abuse. Rape. Genital mutilation. Alienation. Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher isn't the easiest film to watch and won't leave anyone with any sort of warm and fuzzy feeling. However, as with so much of Haneke's work, it is a wonder to behold from a technical level. Erika Kohut (Isabelle Hubert), a piano instructor with a myriad of deeply-rooted psychological issues, lives with her abusive and controlling mother (Annie Girardot). When she comes in contact with promising young student Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), her already loose tether on life begins to unravel. Hubert is remarkable throughout, but what really steals the show is Haneke's sure-handed direction as, among other things, he wisely and repeatedly allows the camera to remain on faces longer than expected in order to draw out the full emotional impact of the scene. While The Piano Teacher is never easy to watch, it is an excellent movie.

Ultra-realist, striking, questioning, violent but above all psychologically disturbing... I experienced similar emotions to the ones I felt during watching A Clockwork Orange and A Requiem for a Dream. One should watch it from a Freudian perspective to give a meaning to most scenes. Haneke does not use any background sound which gives a very interesting taste to the movie.

This is certainly among the strangest movies I've ever seen, not just for the peculiar choice of subject but also for the way they delivered the story to us. Surely the book they adapted played a large part in this but for me, never letting the characters get on the same page as each other sexually was as foreign a filmmaking choice as the language they were speaking. The artistic merit was immediately obvious but I can't think of another movie where the audience is made to feel the same frustration that the characters felt like that. That in addition to the ambiguous ending and Huppert's performance (this was the first time I'd seen her) have made this a fully unforgettable viewing experience. I wasn't a big fan of the scenes of her interacting with her mom as the mom's reactions didn't really escalate in proportion to Isabelle's actions, they just sort of happened and were forgotten in the next scene. I did like how they used all the diegetic piano music in place of a film score though!

1001 movies to see before you die. Bizarre, but still well made and entertaining. It crossed over some lines that I did not enjoy, but still the juxtaposition of the high class refined Viennese music scene and the hard vulgarities was different. I didn't quite understand them speaking French when in Austria though. Regardless, it was a memorable film. Saw it on HBO.

The Piano Teacher is maybe the most well crafted character study ever put on film. Isabelle Huppert gives a masterful performance and director Michael Haneke once again proves that you can shock people and still create high art. Absolute must see for anyone who appreciates cinema.

The next time someone criticizes your interpretation of Schubert, just nod along. One of relatively few 'disturbing' psychological dramas that actually wields its less palatable elements as an integral part of the narrative design rather than an overused weapon in the arthouse arsenal. Coming off a recent viewing of Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, the differences are night and day; where the former feels like a thematic nuclear bomb intended to garner controversy alone, The Piano Teacher delivers a simmering character study where the main character is twisted and depraved, but understandably so. Huppert's Erika is the product of a repressive upbringing whose stunted emotional growth manifests itself as a series of unorthodox fetishes hiding beneath a composed façade. In Erika's pursuit of a relationship with a student, Benoît Magimel's Walter, the plot evolves into a fascinating discourse on the nature of control, personal conduct, and desire. Erika's fragmented psyche almost cannot be adequately conveyed without diving to the unsettling depths that Haneke is willing to explore, and Huppert delivers one absolutely incredible performance probing a layered and fundamentally tortured character. I imagine it's not the best date night movie, though. (4/5)

6.7/10 — "Decent"/"Worth Watching" -(Seen on 9/1/21)