December 2001 - Nr. 12
Toronto Film Festival
- Part 3 -
by Randi Spires
Repression and outbursts of twisted violence are also elements in the visions of two other filmmakers, veteran Michael Haneke and first-time director Jessica Hausner.
InThePianist Michael Haneke equates high society with high propriety and stifled emotions. The pianist of the title is Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. As such she is a symbol of high European culture and a vehicle for its propagation. She is not really her own woman but is expected to behave in a manner which epitimizes the restrictive ideals of high culture and civilization.
On the surface all is well. But Kohut, now in her late 30’s, is boxed in both by outside social expectations and the tyrannical mother with whom she has an intense love/hate relationship. This parallels the love/hate relationship she has with her profession. Kohut has virtually no personal life and although the apartment she shares with her mother has two bedrooms, she sleeps in a twin bed pushed up against her moms, like a frightened child. Her sexuality is entirely voyeuristic, confined to watching porn videos in newsstand backrooms. Something’s got to give here and it does when one of her students seduces her. Her sexual tastes have been formed by S/M pornographic scriptings coupled with guilt and shame. When she asks her lover to tie her up and abuse her, he at first recoils. Then, finding he is too attached to abandon her, obliges. In the final scene she acts in a confused self-destructive manner, a lost sheep inexpertly slashing her way through a forest of emotions.
Although Haneke is Austrian, The Pianist was shot in French. That made it a little confusing for me because although I mostly read the subtitles, I had to keep reminding myself that the story was taking place in Vienna not Paris. Before seeing the film I had grave doubts about Isabelle Huppert’s capacity to become Kohut. But I was dead wrong. Huppert was totally believable, perfect for the role. Do not be dissuaded from this film by its darkness. The Pianist is a profoundly moving work of cinema, worth looking out for.
The starting point for Jessica Hausner’s script for Lovely Rita was an actual case in which a young girl committed a terrible crime. In her film Hausner condemns the formality and the emotional coldness of Austrian middle class life.
Lovely Rita is an ordinary young woman alienated from both her family and society. At school she is excluded and bullied for unknown reasons. To this she reacts badly which of course doesn’t help matters. At home she faces rigid controlling parents who rarily show her genuine affection. They go through the mechanics of caring but there is little real feeling behind these gestures. Also the smallest of offences such as not putting the lid (not the seat) of the toilet down provokes a disproportionately punative response.
Her father is an angry man who sublimates his aggression, when not taking it out on his family, by target shooting in the basement.
Unhappy at both home and school and unattached to either, Rita never develops a perspective beyond her own needs. For instance, she rustles a seriously ill ‘boyfriend’ from his hospital bed and takes him outside with no thought that she may be endangering his life.
She skips school and has a brief fling with a bus driver. This ends badly but we are given no clues as to who rejected who, possibly to indicate Rita has no idea either.
Through all this Rita is emotionally flat. We watch throughout the film for the rage which surely must be boiling under that exterior to erupt, and erupt it does, in a most casual way. In the end we are as confused as she is by her violent outbursts and no wiser as to why some people are resilient enough to survive emotionally abusive beginnings while others fester and rage. Maybe we should be afraid. Maybe we should be very afraid. The emotional barrens of Dogdays and The Pianist are worlds apart. Yet both foster lovely Ritas.
