Piano Teacher, The

Unrated Director's Cut

Winner of three top prizes at Cannes, including the Grand Jury Prize, The Piano Teacher is a lucid descent into the most feverish depths of sexual obsession. Isabelle Huppert's Cannes and European Film Award winning performance (called "A brilliant psychological portrait" by Variety) effortlessly illuminate the darkest corners of the human psyche in one of the most courageous characterizations of her celebrated career. Huppert and her co-star (and fellow Cannes honoree) Benoit Magimel transcend mere art-house erotica as they plunge headlong into a whirlpool of twisted desire and rage.

Based on Elfriede Jelinek's controversial 1983 novel, The Piano Teacher tells the story of Erika (Huppert), a middle-aged classical piano instructor who is trapped between her rigid passion for music and her suffocating home life. After subtly tormenting her students at a Vienna conservatory and battling her domineering mother in an undeclared war at home, Erika seeks solitary release through nightly voyeuristic wanderings and self-inflicted masochistic experiments. Drawn to Erika's unrelenting perfectionism, Walter (Magimel), a vain and handsome young student, tragically mistakes her unraveling sanity for growing ardor. After an unspeakably cruel assault on another conservatory student, Erika and Walter's perverse courtship explodes in an encounter The New Yorker declared, "may be the strangest sex scene in the history of movies."

Director Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Code Unknown) expertly infused The Piano Teacher with a disturbing, clinical intensity that side-steps both moralism and prurience. A film that charts a savage expedition into the grimmest and most tragic recesses of female sexuality without a trace of sentimentality or salaciousness, The Piano Teacher is "Altogether dazzling!...for those who like films that take big risks and get away with them" (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times).