Romy keeps thinking about Samuel, and it means it BDSM now he plays a role in his marriage. But, as in most sensual films, the threat posed by desire is ultimately smoothed over and understated. His life returns to normal, and what happened to Samuel is neatly wrapped back into his relationships and work. Without suggesting that the dream continues to remain contained, safely isolated between the couple and the world they already live in.
Pillion it takes a different route but arrives at the same destination. Colin and Ray’s relationship is imperfect, a sometimes awkward meeting of fiction and reality – but, as in. Baby girlthe tension between the two finally ends. Colin takes the uncomfortable parts of his relationship with Ray as a lesson, climbing into a shiny new world of automation and a duly updated Grindr profile.
What separates Piano Instructor in such matters is its refusal to remove such differences. Where Baby girl again Pillion translating sexual desire into matters of self-discovery or emotional transformation, Haneke leaves desire punishing and unresolved. Dreams refuse to pave the way to freedom or self-discovery for Erika, and it is this lack of resolution that continues to give the film its power. The events of the film change Erika’s submissiveness very slowly: she starts with contempt and stays there.
Whether Erika learns anything about herself over the course of the film is one question. Whether he knows something about his desire in the first place is another. Using a simple psychological framework for modern sexual discourse, Erika seems to know what she wants; it’s easy, in fact, to read him as someone who has a real handle on his (admittedly perverted) desires. The letter he writes to his student Walter, coolly listing the many depraved acts he hopes to face, doesn’t feel a million miles away from Field’s overly detailed profile.
However, in the end it seems that Erika doesn’t know what she wants. Uncontrollable symptoms accompany his desire: he coughs uncontrollably when Walter asks to kiss his neck; you feel the urge to urinate next to a couple having sex in a car; and vomiting during intercourse. Even his sudden, violent embrace of his mother near the end of the film seems to come out of nowhere, something like an involuntary spasm.
Erika’s piano playing suggests something similar, meticulous and superficial but betrays something unusual, her primary connection with the music playing against the icy discipline it is meant to contain. Hands, as Darian Leader says in his book of the same name, are not the obedient servants they appear to be. You might think of this as the return of the oppressed: a desire so unbearable in its magnitude that we cannot face it directly.
Walter, who seems to be a well-adjusted couple, also has the strength to hold on to his wish. At first he seems to want something like a normal sexual relationship with Erika, completely withdrawing from the humiliation she asks him to do. However, when he finally returns to his house, he has changed into a sad person beauty at its besthe commits violence that surpasses even the text he wrote.
It can be tempting to read this as Walter simply presents his own .‘truth’ desire. But Piano Instructor it does not provide such clarity. Like Erika, Walter seems unsure of what he wants, even amid the climax itself. His cool rejection of his violent powers in the last few minutes of the film leaves his passion as unremarkable as before. Haneke refuses to be mentally ill or ill, and we are left wondering how Walter came to understand what happened or what his role in the matter really was. We don’t know if Erika is relishing her final reunion with Walter or if she feels truly victimized — or, perhaps more worryingly, both.
“Sex is distracting. What could be wrong with you?” asks psychologist Jamieson Webster in his book .‘Disorganization and Sex‘. Piano Instructor it offers a bleak answer: a world where desire, in all its disorder and excess, remains imperfect and unattainable. Two decades on, it still resonates deeply because it reminds us that our desire is unreadable – and that, try as we might, we don’t know what we’re agreeing to when we agree to be the object of someone else’s desire.
