Why "The Piano Teacher" Still Haunts Me

Introduction – What Made Me Return to This Film?

It's been 25 years since The Piano Teacher was released, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I first watched it two years ago. I was reminded of it again while browsing the Criterion section at Waterloo Records in Austin, adding films to my watchlist and admiring the ones I’d already seen and the ones I hadn’t. When I saw The Piano Teacher on the shelf, I froze. I remembered how it made me feel. The discomfort. The intensity. Erika's strange, unrelenting presence. I started wondering how someone like her would navigate dating today.

The first time I watched it, I was in bed watching on my iPad, trying to distract myself during a rough patch in my relationship. Yet, the film didn’t let me look away – I was pulled in, and remained continually engaged with Erika’s character and actions. She was distant and obsessive, but also familiar in ways I didn’t expect. It was disheartening to watch how clearly she seemed to want intimacy, and how little she could ask for it.

The standout of this movie is in large part due to Isabelle Huppert, who delivers one of the most dynamic performances of her career. She carries a film that is both deliberate and deeply unsettling. The Piano Teacher is slow to unfold, and its second half is difficult to endure, but its precision and severity have earned it a lasting place in the Criterion Collection. It isn’t a film for everyone, but for those willing to sit with its discomfort, it offers an experience that is impossible to forget.

From the start of the movie, we are thrust into Erika’s strange relationship with their mother, suddenly forced to experience the suffocating codependent relationship they have. It's intense, controlling, and you can tell that it's completely entangled with Erika's sense of self. Due to her upbringing, and her maladaptive behaviors, Erika holds herself to impossible standards. She projects that pressure onto her students. Her sexuality feels more like self-punishment than pleasure. She peruses adult sex stores for a vicarious, depersonalized thrill. Nothing about her is casual, and the film never pretends otherwise. That’s part of what makes it so hard to watch — and so hard to forget.

Holding the DVD in my hand, I kept thinking about how this kind of desire, the kind that is messy and shame-filled and hard to name, doesn’t really have a place in the way people talk about love now. Dating today often feels like it’s filtered through irony and caution. People feel afraid to say what they want. It's so much easier to hide behind a meme than it is to speak clearly in camera about who you are and what you want. There’s so much fear of being too much, or too direct. The desire to be seen and understood is a fragile thing, and ironic detachment offers a script for keeping the scariness of that feeling at arm’s length. It feels safer to turn everything into a joke, to shrug, to never risk being too sincere. Mediating experience through irony keeps the harshness of feeling at bay. Erika didn’t have irony, but she had her own kind of armor: silence, control, and cruelty turned inward. Both are strategies to survive wanting, and that’s why the film unsettles me so much now.

There’s a moment in the film where Erika explains a piano piece, “Schumann’s Fantasia in C Major” to a student. She says the piece is about the twilight of the mind and someone losing their sense of reality; that Schumann isn’t yet insane, but he knows he’s losing his mind. He clings to reason, even as it slips away. That moment stayed with me, because it became a metaphor for Erika herself. She knows she is close to losing something; she sees the edge of it, and she refuses to let go.

II. Erika’s Desire and Its Repression

Throughout the film, Erika’s psychology reads as one of lonely repression. She is constantly scrutinized by her mother, which leaves her emotionally stunted and without any safe release for her tension or trauma. Any attempt to deviate is punished, so Erika learns to keep herself contained. The closest she comes to release is berating her students for not meeting her impossible standards, or seeking thrill by watching intimacy at a distance in sex shops. Under her mother’s eye, she never had space to explore her desires safely, and the uncertainty of a messy connection doesn’t appeal to someone who finds clarity only in structure, the way one finds clarity in learning a piece of music.

The film gives Erika a kind of mirror in a student who is also trapped in a codependent relationship with her mother. Instead of showing care, Erika chooses to sit back, judge, and keep her distance. Her repression holds her in a cold comfort until she meets Walter (played by Benoît Magimel). He likes her reserve and stoicism, and Erika is drawn in by the rare experience of being noticed. She even begins watching him outside their lessons. But when Walter briefly shows interest in the student Erika treats harshly, Erika retaliates violently, slipping glass into the girl’s coat pocket and ruining her hand. Her desire to be wanted twists quickly into shame and vengeance.

This is the cycle that defines Erika. She wants to be seen and desired like anyone else, but the shame she carries makes her desire unbearable. She cannot allow herself to actualize it without fear. Intimacy has to follow terms she understands, and what terrifies her most about love and sex is the vulnerability it demands.

III. The Role of Irony and Distance

One of the most tempting parts of ironic detachment is how it keeps things at a distance. You can laugh first, shrug off meaning, and never risk being the butt of the joke. For many people, that feels safer than being exposed. This film is a difficult watch, especially because the latter half is filled with disturbing and abusive dynamics around sex and control. What compelled me to return to it was a central question: If I were like Erika, would I be better off today than she was then? Erika lived with so much shame around her sexuality that I kept wondering if access to the internet would have changed her. Would seeing others with the same shame, the same longing, have given her a sense of solidarity? Or would she only have found new ways to watch at a distance, never risking the discomfort of closeness?

That train of thought eventually turned back on me. Erika’s resistance to sincerity feels so relevant because ironic detachment has become a familiar mode of survival for many of us — myself included. Each time I wondered why Erika pushed away sincerity, I thought of the ways I’ve done the same, just through different channels. If Erika existed in our modern world, I could imagine her finding comfort in communities of people who are also avoidant and lonely, maybe even sharing her traumas. Yet she would likely still hold herself above it, still longing for devotion while resisting intimacy. That is what makes The Piano Teacher feel so modern. Erika’s repression and irony both come from the same place: the need for control. Moreso, beneath that control sits a desperate wish to be seen and cared for. What unsettles me most is how close that feels to the world I know now, and how often I recognize myself in it.

IV. Does Naming Help/Hurt?

The second half of the film turns devastating, after Walter and Erika share a moment of intimacy. When Erika finally feels comfortable enough to name what she wants on her own terms, she does it with clarity. Except, what follows is cruelty and violence. 

When Erika names her desire, it’s an act of sincerity. She puts it into words, and for a moment lets her guard down and allow someone into her world. Her letter to Walter wasn’t rooted in approval or performance, it was an earnest attempt to express what intimacy might look like for her, between them. I wish I could do the same — to name what I want in full, to own it without flinching. Watching this film made me realize how often I avoid that clarity, how much I still wonder if I have the language to ask for what I want, and the courage to face rejection if it comes.

The Piano Teacher remains relevant because it refuses to make desire simple or safe. It shows how costly it can be to admit what you want, and how fragile the risk of being known really is. That challenge has lingered with me ever since I saw the movie again by chance in that shop. It's forced me to notice the ways I’ve turned my own desires and dating experiences into performances — palatable, ironic, safe — and to ask whether the distance I’ve built has helped me survive or only kept me hidden and how it’s shaped dating for me.

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