Romy retains fantasising about Samuel, and it’s implied that BDSM now performs some function in her marriage. However, as in lots of erotic movies, the risk posed by need is ultimately smoothed over and neutralised. Her life returns to regular, and what has occurred with Samuel is folded neatly again into her relationship and job. Regardless of the trace that the fantasy persists it stays contained, safely quarantined inside the couple and the world they already inhabit.
Pillion takes a totally different route however arrives someplace pretty related. Colin and Ray’s relationship is imperfect, a typically uneasy assembly of fantasy and actuality – however, as in Babygirl, the tensions between the 2 in the end iron themselves out. Colin takes the extra uncomfortable components of his relationship with Ray as a lesson, stepping in the direction of a superb new world of self-actualisation and a suitably up to date Grindr profile.
What distinguishes The Piano Trainer from such narratives is exactly its refusal to clean such tensions away. The place Babygirl and Pillion translate sexual need into narratives of self-discovery or emotional transformation, Haneke leaves need punishing and unresolved. Fantasy refuses to open a path towards liberation or self-knowledge for Erika, and it’s this lack of decision that continues to offer the movie its pressure. The occasions of the movie remodel Erika’s subjectivity little or no: she begins in abjectness and stays there.
Whether or not Erika learns one thing about herself over the course of the movie is one query. Whether or not she is aware of something about her need within the first place is one other. Utilizing the simple psychological framework of up to date sexual discourse, Erika does appear to know what she desires; it’s simple, in reality, to learn her as somebody with a actual deal with on her (admittedly perverse) wishes. The letter she writes to her pupil Walter, coolly itemizing the various wicked acts she hopes to be topic to, doesn’t really feel a million miles away from a very detailed Feeld profile.
Finally, although, Erika doesn’t appear to know what she desires in any respect. Unruly signs accompany her need: she coughs uncontrollably when Walter asks to kiss her neck; feels the urge to urinate subsequent to a couple having intercourse in a automotive; and vomits throughout intercourse. Even her sudden, violent embrace of her personal mom close to the top of the movie appears to come back out of nowhere, one thing like an involuntary spasm.
Erika’s piano enjoying suggests one thing related, meticulous and mechanical on the floor however betraying one thing wilder, her primal reference to the music straining in opposition to the icy self-discipline meant to include it. Palms, as Darian Chief remarks in his ebook of the identical title, should not the obedient servants they appear to be. You would possibly consider this because the return of the repressed: a need so insupportable in its magnitude it could possibly’t be confronted instantly.
Walter, the extra ostensibly well-adjusted of the pair, additionally has a free grip on his need. Initially he appears to need one thing like a regular sexual relationship with Erika, recoiling completely from the humiliations she asks him to carry out. But when he lastly returns to her condominium he has remodeled right into a sadist par excellence, performing with a violence that exceeds even the script she has written.
It might be tempting to learn this as Walter merely revealing his ‘true’ need. However The Piano Trainer affords no such readability. Like Erika, Walter appears uncertain of what he desires, even throughout the climactic scene itself. His breezy disavowal of his capability for violence within the movie’s last couple of minutes leaves his need as opaque as earlier than. Haneke refuses to psychologise or pathologise, and we’re left questioning how Walter understands what has occurred or what his function within the affair actually was. We by no means know whether or not Erika enjoys her last encounter with Walter or feels genuinely violated – or, maybe most troublingly, each.
“Intercourse disorganises. What would possibly include it?” asks psychoanalyst Jameison Webster in her ebook ‘Disorganisation and Intercourse’. The Piano Trainer affords a bleak reply: a world during which need, in all its disorganisation and extra, stays uncontained and uncontainable. Twenty years on, it stays so transgressive exactly as a result of it reminds us that our personal need is illegible – and that, attempt as we would, we are able to by no means know what we’re consenting to once we comply with be the item of another person’s need.
