The Piano Teacher

Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.
 

– Michael Haneke

Join us this August for Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, featuring a selection of the Austrian auteur’s films back on the big screen. See any two films from this retrospective for the special price of £16 when booked at the same time - simply add the tickets to your basket and the discount will be applied at check-out.

Academy Award–winning Austrian director Michael Haneke shifted his focus from the social to the psychological for this riveting study of female sexuality and the dynamics of control, an adaptation of a controversial 1983 novel by Elfriede Jelinek. 

Haneke finds his match in Isabelle Huppert, who delivers an icy but quietly seething performance as Erika, a middle-aged 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 young 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.