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Cardullo reviews The Pianist directed by Roman Polanski and The Piano Teacher directed by Michael Haneke.

I SERIOUSLY DOUBT that Roman Polanski elected to film The Pianist out of a belief that classical music may be the armor protecting an almostdead emotional self, rather than a freestanding symbol of enlightened consciousness.1 But that is the impression one gets after observing this movie's passive, feckless, and effete protagonist for two-and-a-half hours.

The Pianist is based on the autobiography of the same name by Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish composer of classical as well as popular music and a performer on Poland's state radio prior to World War II. (He played the last live music-Chopin's Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor-heard on free Polish radio before German artillery destroyed the station's transmitter.) His memoir, published as Death of a City in 1946 and immediately produced as a film, Warsaw Robinson, was censored (if not totally suppressed) by the Communists. But the book, renamed The Pianist, reappeared in its original form in 1999, a year before Szpilman's death, and it soon caught the eye of Polanski-who himself escaped the Krakow ghetto as a child and whose mother perished at Auschwitz.

Twenty-six years old and still living at home, shorn of intimate relations, the aptly named Szpilman reserves his ardor for music-so fervently and so completely that he scarcely notices German bombs crashing near his Warsaw studio as the Nazi invasion begins in September of 1939. He is an able-bodied man, but he ignores his government's call for all such men to join in the city's defense. During the German occupation, when Jews are ordered to wear Star-of-David armbands and to relocate to the ghetto, Szpilman's brother Henryk resists these edicts, but Wlad complies with them impassively. Nonetheless, judaism and Jewishness have no place whatsoever in his life, which for him is almost exclusively an artistic life. Indeed, his attitude toward his fellow Jews fluctuates between indifference and disgust.

Arbitrarily plucked out of line by an otherwise despicable Jewish policeman, Szpilman is spared the cattle car to Treblinka. While his family members-parents, two sisters, and the one brother-are driven like sheep to the slaughter in August of 1942, he is led lamb-like to salvation. First he survives by playing the piano for scraps of food in a ghetto cafe where rich Jews pass their final hours. Then a friend from the judenrat secures him work on a construction crew; and, when physical labor proves too strenuous for Szpilman, he is made a storeroom clerk. Though his storeroom serves as a conduit for smuggled weapons, Szpilman himself still will not fight. Rather, with the help of benevolent Poles, he hides out in vacant apartments. he continues to endure, yet his deepest fears are not for his life, but of losing his concert reviews and of frostbite, which is ruining his fingers. By the last winter of the war, Szpilman is emaciated and delirious, at the same time as he is obsessed with the danger that a splinter in his thumb poses to his future musical career.

Finally, while scrounging for food in an abandoned warehouse, Szpilman comes face-to-face with a German officer. Instead of drawing his revolver, the officer asks the Jew what he does for a living, then leads him to a piano. Stiff and unpracticed, Szpilman manages to reprise Chopin's Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor, whereupon the officer stows him in an attic directly above German headquarters and feeds him. After the Nazis retreat, Szpilman emerges wearing the military coat the officer left him and is nearly shot by liberating Polish troops (in Polanski's film as well as the doctored Warsaw Robinson, Soviet troops). Only by raising his hands and shouting, "I'm Polish! I'm Polish!" does he succeed in saving himself.

In Szpilman's autobiography, the German officer, named WiIm Hosenfeld, is a committed teacher, family man, and devout Catholic in his late forties who abhorred Nazism, repeatedly risking his life to rescue others, Poles orjews, from extermination. In Polanski's movie, he becomes a figure half Hosenfeld's age, a senior staff commander and Third-Reich poster boy-a Nazi, pure and simple. Thus duped, we can easily believe that had Szpilman identified himself as a spot welder, say, instead of a pianist, Hosenfeld would have shot him instantly. Ignorant of the real Hosenfeld's character, we rather too neatly see him as a monster transformed by music (a particularly Germanic redemption), and music that on film is played flawlessly, implausibly, by a physically devastated Jew-ironically, himself a kind of monster transformed by music. Resurrected after the war, Szpilman searches not for his missing family, but appositely for his Doppelganger the German officer, and devotes the rest of his life to music as he otherwise silently suffers each day under Communism.

What's wrong with this picture, or what makes The Pianist in the end an artless film? First, Polanski and his screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, did not merely re-create Wladyslaw Szpilman's dispassionate memoir. They also altered, embellished, and distorted it. Aside from the change to WiIm Hosenfeld, the film introduces us to one Dorota-blond, virginal, Polish, and a fledgling cellist. Hollywood-style romance beckons between her and Szpilman, but the bond is never consummated. Dorota does manage to exclaim, "This is disgraceful!" when confronted with a "No Jews Allowed!" sign on a restaurant, and again, "Disgraceful! It's too absurd," as she observes Jews being herded into the Warsaw ghetto. Later in the film she reappears, tantalizingly pregnant, and endangers herself to hide Szpilman. "No one thought they'd hold out for so long," Dorota says to him while watching the ghetto uprising of April 1943 from the window of his hideout (which in reality was nowhere near the ghetto). "My God, did they fight!" When, in response, the pianist sighs, "What good did it do?" she tells him, "They died with dignity. Now the Poles will rebel."

Dorota, then, is a fetching and inspiring figure-and one completely fabricated for the movie. It is almost as if Polanski, too, was frustrated by the inert abjection of his hero, so he proceeded to correct Szpilman's universe by furnishing it with an admirer of heroism. But the lofty character with whom he upgrades the moral and emotional situation is a Pole, an apotheosis of Polish goodness, and a Gentile who instructs her Jew in honor at the same time as she likens Polish suffering to Jewish suffering. Maybe Polanski and Harwood made this addition for the sake of the self-regarding Christians in their audience, or to counter Henryk Szpilman's reciting of Shylock's rejection of Christian forbearance: "If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" (In the book, Henryk "took out a small Oxford edition of Shakespeare" and read in it while awaiting deportation; in the film, Polanski improves upon the historical truth by having Wlad's brother select The Merchant of Venice for his-and our-edification.)

Whatever the case, these changes to Szpilman's already unheroic autobiography have the effect of turning The Pianist into a morality play on the division of the European Jewish soul between absolute passivity or pacifism in the face of possible ethnic annihilation, on the one hand, and mass uprising of the kind that would at least permit an honorable death if not a Semitic victory, on the other. Except that this division never occurs in the heart or mind of Wladyslaw Szpilman; the battle takes place only outside his character, the main character, and that's the problem. As in this exchange, upon the liquidation by the Nazis of most of the Warsaw ghetto in August 1942, between a ranting local dentist and Szpilman's simpering father (dialogue that appears in the autobiography and is replicated almost verbatim in the film):

Dentist. It's a disgrace to us all! We're letting them take us to our death like sheep to the slaughter! If we attacked the Germans, half a million of us, we could break out of the ghetto, or at least die honorably, not as a stain on the face of history!

Szpilman Sr. We're not heroes! We're perfectly ordinary people, which is why we prefer to risk hoping for that ten percent chance of living.

Wladyslaw Szpilman's father was himself a violinist, and I don't find it accidental that The Pianist shares its classical-music motif, not to speak of its Academy Awards, with Schindler's List (1993). In Spielberg's film, viewers will recall, the German officer who sits down to play the piano in a room "cleansed" of its Jews during the obliteration of the Krakow ghetto, and the two soldiers who argue over whether his music is by Bach or Mozart, are clumsily meant to tell us that even Nazis can have an appreciation for classical music, which is to say a human face beneath their monstrous mask. Schindler's List is itself a morality play, using Jews as props, on the division of the German soul between the absolute good of Catholic businessman Oskar Schindler and the absolute evil of SS Commander Amon Goeth (as opposed to being a tragedy about the dialectical, inner struggle between these two contradictory impulses in one human being).

That is, it is a German's morality play that diminishes the humanity of Holocaust victims by depicting the genocide of the Jews from the point of view of the perpetrators. Roberto Benigni's tragicomic Life Is Beautiful (1998) committed the reverse sin: in the process of reaffirming the humanity of concentration-camp victims, this movie sugarcoated the camps and thus diminished the guilt of the war criminals. The Pianist manages to repeat both these sins with its portrait of a musician whose judaism is largely an accident of birth, whose girlfriend Dorota is anything but a Polish anti-Semite or Nazi collaborator, and whose German savior in a parting gesture gives Szpilman his coat, as the Lord commands, with the following words: 'You must survive; God wills it." all of which raises a by-now familiar question: should there be a continual flow of films on this subject, a veritable Holocaust genre, as it were? Do we need continual reminders of what happened at the death camps, or have images of Nazi atrocities been sufficiently burned into our collective memory? In short, was The Pianist necessary?

The title of Michael Haneke's latest film also happens to be The Pianist La Pianiste, actually, since this is a French-language movie even though it is set in Austria, directed by an Austrian, and adapted by him from a 1983, autobiographical novel by the Austrian Elfriede Jelinek.2 Jelinek's title was Die Klavierlehrerin, whence derives the picture's North American name: The Piano Teacher. Haneke wouldn't make it, we're told, without Isabelle Huppert in the titular role, so the characters speak French despite the fact that they live in Vienna. This sort of contradiction is common in the American cinema, but becomes more noticeable in foreign films-which probably says more about American ethnocentrism and insularity than it does about linguistic or geographic anomaly in works of art.

Yet the difference in language in The Piano Teacher is the least of this picture's anomalies. And anyone who knows Haneke's previous work would be prepared for them. he began with what he has called a trilogy-The Seventh Continent (1989), followed by Benny's Video (1992) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)-that constituted his "reports on the progressive emotional glaciation of my country." The Seventh Continent, is based on a real-life event in which a comfortable, well-insulated bourgeois family extinguished itself in a spasm of communal suicide-the result, the film implies, of lives so lived without connection that they must ultimately disappear into a black hole of their own making. Benny's Video is about an adolescent who not only interposes action videos between himself and the world, but who also lives in a cave of a room with the blinds perpetually drawn and another video link-up to relay the view outside his apartment building. The succession of videos so desensitizes this teenager to violence, so numbs him to any kind of human empathy, that he can thoughtlessly kill a girl "to see what it's like."

The film that follows Benny 's Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, is a mosaic of glimpses into urban lives that builds toward-or is built around-one real-life event in which a nineteen-year-old student, Maximilian B., walked into a Viennese bank and shot three people to death. Although Haneke does not suggest that Maximilian's mind had been turned, like Benny's, by a constant diet of violent images, his murderous act is imbued with potential significance in spite-or rather because-of its being sucked up into the indiscriminate or generalized soup of media imagery. And it is the petrifying nature of this imagery, or rather our willing surrender of our lives to the products of the "fantasy industry" (which includes the news business and extends to your home computer), that Haneke seems to be indicting.

Haneke's first film after the trilogy was Funny Games (1997), a hairraising, almost unwatchable essay on screen violence in which two youths turn up at the well-appointed holiday home of a bourgeois couple and methodically insult, assault, torture, and then kill them along with their child. The cruel joke here is that the actual violence all takes place off-screen. Moreover, Haneke creates an unsettling ambiguity in Funny Games by maintaining an icy, even slightly disdainful distance from both the family and the two young men. Here, as in his earlier pictures, he is a cool, meticulous formalist who favors full-to-long shots in which the camera remains stationary. This is a style we shall also see in The Piano Teacher, and one that, in Haneke's words, "is an appeal for a cinema of insistent questioning in place of false-because-too-quick answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating nearness."

Just a year before The Piano Teacher, in Code Unknown (2000), Haneke took this style to a new extreme with an opening nine-minute tracking shot back and forth along a Paris street. Thus, in a public place, he put the thinking, questioning spectator in the excruciatingly uncomfortable shoes of someone confronting brutality and injustice in a situation where it would be easy-or perhaps not so easy-not to intervene. (The film takes a critical look at the ethnic heterogeneity of contemporary French life through separate characters and their interlocking stories.) In any event, the choice would have to be made, even as one would not have to make such a choice in the voyeur-like or "fourth-wall" situation created by cinematic violence inside the privacy of somebody else's home.

Speaking of voyeurism, that is what fortyish Erika Kohut's sex life has long consisted of, together with pornography and self-mutilation, in The Piano Teacher. Her bearing rigid and her expression taut, Erika is a strict and exacting piano instructor at the staid Vienna Conservatory. She is a person of considerable artistic gifts, yet she has never become the richand-famous concert pianist that her mother had envisioned (and for which the latter had sacrificed). What is less clear is whether Erika has fallen short because she doesn't quite have the talent and drive, or whether she has purposely sabotaged her own career in order to spite Mother.

What is certain is that this mother-daughter relationship is embattled, suffocating, and incestuous in all but deed. The daughter in fact sleeps with her domineering, possessive, manipulative mother in their one-bedroom apartment, their single beds pushed tightly together to yield an image that gives the lie to Erika's authoritarian facade. She is human development arrested by a stultifying past fused to a subjugating present-a past-cum-present that seems also to have claimed her father, who is dying (or dies in the course of the film) in a mental hospital.

In an attempt to free herself of submission, Erika frequently squabbles with her mother, to the point that they actually beat each other. We see such a beating in the opening scene, after Erika has come home from the conservatory three hours late. Parent and child quarrel over the lateness and about the expensive dress that Erika bought during her time alone. After the mother violently rips this dress, the fighting starts and continues, bitterly, until the daughter draws first blood. Then the two women dissolve into sobs and apologies as the television remains on in the background, making what we have just witnessed seem at once extremely pathological and very familiar.

Such is the feeling we get as we read felinek's novel, which is narrated in the present tense, without exclamation, in short, cool sentences plunked down one after another: the prose style appears plain, that is, but its narrative substance is dark and discomfiting. Here are the book's opening three sentences:

The piano teacher, Erika Kohut, bursts like a whirlwind into the apartment she shares with her mother. Mama likes calling Erika her little whirlwind, for the child can be an absolute speed demon. She is trying to escape her mother.

Yet the "child" is a mature woman and "Mama" is elderly. And, although Erika may be trying to escape her mother, she remains living with her.

Jelinek's novel focuses on the daughter's relationship with her destructive, almost demoniacal parent, but Haneke's adaptation shifts the emphasis toward Erika's relationship with Walter Klemmer, a pianist, engineer, and ice-hockey enthusiast in his mid-to-late twenties who sets his heart on this older woman after seeing her play at a private recital. Otherwise Haneke has filmed Die Klavierlehrmn with near total fidelity, streamlining the sequence of events here and transposing a location there-even to the point of keeping the movie more firmly indoors, or under cover of night, than the novel does. (This is an instance of spiritual or figurative fidelity, because Jelinek's tight, methodical prose can suggest such restrictiveness, repression, or claustrophobia even during a voyeuristic scene in the openness of Vienna's Prater Park, but the cinema, which is a manifestly visual medium, must choose its locations more with the intent of making them contribute symbolically to the task of narration.)

Erika Kohut's masochistic relationship with her mother is naturally (if that is the word) transposed into a sadistic posture with her students -among them Walter, with whom she combines her perversions by conducting a sadomasochistic affair. But her deformed sexuality results for the most part in physical as well as emotional isolation, which the cinematographer Christian Berger graphically renders in images of Erika alone in her clean, well-lighted studio, where portraits of classicalmusic patriarchs stare down at her from the wall. Even as they stare, so does she as, away from the clutches of her mother, Erika haunts a seedy drive-in movie theater, discovers a couple copulating inside an automobile, then squats next to their car to urinate as she watches in excitement.

After hours Erika also haunts porno shops, where, at one such place located in a mall, she imperiously ignores the puzzled gaze of men as she enters a video booth, watches a split screen showing explicit sexual acts, then rapturously sniffs semen-stained tissue left there by the previous occupant. We do the watching next when, home alone in the bathroom, she cuts her vulva with a razor blade as she sits on the edge of the tub in a nightgown. This moment, like so many others in the Kohut apartment, itself combines the pathological with the familiar as Erika's mother interrupts her with a call for dinner, forcing the daughter to cover her tracks by washing the blood from the bathtub, staunching the bleeding of her vagina, putting on clean panties, and otherwise adopting a posture of complete normalcy-or what passes for such in this world.

To break the spell of her masochistic solitude as well as submission, Erika demands subjugation from her conservatory pupils with an air of disdainful superiority and biting sarcasm. This approach is encouraged by none other than her mother, who fears that little Erika's pupils might best her in her own areas of expertise-especially Schubert but also Schumann. And Mother is aware that one student, Anna Schober (who also has a domineering, intrusive mother), shows a talent that could rival that of her precious daughter. Not by chance, Erika is several times shown instructing her would-be protegee in a rendition of Die Winterreise, or Winter Journey (1824), the twenty-four-song cycle of verses by Wilhelm Muller set to music by Franz Schubert.

The narrative of a rejected lover staggering across a frozen wasteland toward nothingness, the Winterreise is thought to encapsulate virtually the entire Romantic sensibility as we find it in Coleridge, Goethe, and Byron. Erika Kohut appears to identify with this miserable wanderer, who longs for death, and to endorse the songs' tale of the human soul hopelessly cleft and alienated amidst the Biedermeier bogusness of bourgeois existence. We even see her take on the part of rejected lover (not to speak of jealous professional) when, after Walter lends Anna moral or emotional support as she rehearses her piano accompaniment to a male singer's selection from Schubert's lieder-cycle, Erika puts broken glass in the pocket of the girl's jacket, resulting in the severe cutting of Anna's right hand.

The last song of the Winterreise is "Der Leiermann," or "The Organ Grinder," in which Muller's traveler meets a person who, like himself, is a derelict or drifter. That would be Walter Klemmer as he drifts from science to art to sports, and as he plays the piano-not well enough, according to Erika, who, against her colleagues' wishes, tried to deny him admission to the Vienna Conservatory. The organ grinder is clearly a death figure in this lied, for "No one wants to hear him, no one looks at him, / And the dogs snarl around the old man," whose fingers are numb, his feet bare, and whose beggar's plate is ever empty. Similarly, Walter, despite his relative youth, is a figure of death as well as love, for Erika simultaneously wants pain and pleasure from him, extreme physical abuse in addition to sublime sexual satisfaction.

Their mutual attraction is stilted but spontaneous, a "spiritual" bond prompted by the recognition that music, which appears to be the healthier part of Erika's psyche, is a shared love. So when Erika runs to the toilet after maiming the hand of Anna Schober, Walter follows her, but their initial encounter is a bit unorthodox for him. This older woman will only masturbate or fellate her young man-not to the point of orgasm, however, as she assumes total sexual control in an extension of their teacher-student relationship. Erika holds out the promise here of more gratifying lovemaking to Walter, yet she will be unable to give herself to him-a live suitor-in any conventional, romantic fashion.

Instead, soon thereafter in her and her mother's bedroom, she presents him with a long, baroque letter detailing her masochistic needs and specifying exactly how Walter must bind, gag, and punish her; to this end, Erika has even assembled a kind of hope chest containing the requisite ropes and chains. In her infinite perversity, she thus ludicrously brings to the chaotic realm of sexuality the same perfectionist standards, or rigid rules, that she applies in her teaching of classical music. Walter is horrified, disgusted, and finally insulted by what he terms Erika's sick behavior-not least because her busybody of a mother tries to eavesdrop on their encounter outside a locked, and blocked, door.

He leaves but Erika tracks him the next day to his ice-hockey match, after which she performs oral sex on Walter in the locker room to regain his attention and prove she isn't a "pervert." But her tactic doesn't work, particularly after his ejaculation causes her to vomit. And, in a harrowing, modernist visualization of the Winterreise, Erika runs blindly and hysterically out onto the empty skating rink as the screen turns almost completely to a chilling white. In turn Walter will stalk her, as he shows up at Erika's apartment by night, locks her screaming mother in the bedroom, then proceeds so sadistically to batter and rape his piano teacher that even she-no longer in control, in fact in grave danger-is revulsed. Pathetically, Erika asks only that he not strike her hands, and he ignobly complies. For she must use those hands the following day as the accompanist, in Anna Schober's place, to the male singer of songs from Muller and Schubert's Winterreise-cycle.

In the final moments of The Piano Teacher, on that next day, Erika Kohut stands alone, centered in the frame, facing us with her wounded gaze just above the camera-her mother, blithe Walter, and the rest of the conservatory audience having left the lobby to take their seats at the recital where she is to perform. The pianist subsequently withdraws a butcher knife from her elegant handbag and, typically, directs the violence on her own person: she stabs herself just below the left shoulder, turns, and leaves the conservatory, stumbling slightly as she walks down the steps. She may have sacrificed herself in this case, but, for once, she has also sacrificed her music. As Erika wanders into the night, like the lonely hero of the Winterreise, the camera remains holding on a long shot of the blank facade of that honored repository of Western culture, the Vienna Conservatory.

The Piano Teacher is Michael Haneke's best film to date, and that is because, although it shares characteristics and techniques with his trilogy, as well as with Funny Games, the new picture uses them to do more than shock. Furthermore, unlike Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher does not strain to overcome its own sense of disconnection or "glaciation," nor does it affect the will to transcend its own willfulness. And if the film sometimes has the feel of a clinical case study elevated to the subject of aesthetic and philosophical discourse, that case study is not of a facile split personality: Erika Kohut's sexual discontents and her civilized musicianship are components of an integrated personality, all of whose actions are her own, consciously and unashamedly.

Her consciousness, if not soundness, of mind hence begs the question, what is the relationship between high art and sexuality? Rock music and pornography may be implicated in the terrible alienation of the contemporary world, but so might be the classical art at the foundation of Western bourgeois civilization-an art that, as expressed in the rigid cult of classical music, can rob its followers of an emotional life. Indeed, Erika prides herself on having extinguished hers, telling Walter, "I have no feelings ... if I ever do, they won't defeat my intelligence." (Walter, for his part, thinks he does have feelings, which have been refined by classical music-he brags that "[other] people these days know only rock and pop"-but he remains the sole male in the picture to perpetrate physical violence against a woman.)

The preservation of a classical canon, then, may have little to do with creating an equitable and compassionate world, a premise that Haneke illustrates aurally as well as visually during Erika's first visit in the film to a porno store. Before she makes this visit, she practices Schubert's Piano Trio in E Flat with two colleagues at the conservatory; afterwards the music follows along with Erika as the scene shifts to the sex shop, remaining on the soundtrack when she turns on a pornographic video in her private booth, and switching later, at the end of Erika's viewing session, to a song from the Winterreue. If Haneke seems portentously to insist on a metaphorical dimension during this sequence, with its audio overlaps, he makes a similar metaphorical point more subtly through the very nature of his subject and setting.

To wit, The Piano Teacher, like Jelinek's book itself, treats a Vienna that is stuffy in its Schubertian as well as Mozartian pride yet is roiling underneath. The film thus reminds us, more evocatively than any documentary on the subject, than even the novel itself (whose words by themselves somewhat sacrifice the free-associational nature of visual imagery), of the physical horror implicit in the inspirited artistry of the past. We are reminded not only that Vienna, that archetypal European cultural capital, was the site of the welcomed Nazi Anschluss in 1938, but also that arty Austria is the home today of the fascist political leader Jorg Haider.

So, in the end, Polanski's The Pianist and Haneke's La Pianiste have more in common than their titles and the classical music that makes up their scores. What both films posit, directly or indirectly, is that this music may make up a kind of pure, formal, alternative world to our own that does little humane good and in fact may mask evil, unhappiness, maladjustment, or spiritual deadness, on the one hand, and spiritual obtuseness, on the other. Spiritual deadness is what the gaunt, bearded, weepy-eyed, and buffeted Adrian Brody evinces as Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist. Spiritual obtuseness is what Isabelle Huppert, as Erika Kohut, displays in The Piano Teacher in her sexy iciness, her intrinsic combination of intellectual hauteur and primordial physicality, Germanic self-containment and Gallic eruption.

For Erika is so immersed in the world of aesthetics, she wildly imagines that the transcendent paradox of Romantic music-its classical maintaining of control or balance even as it subjectively vents its emotions or loses its mind-applies to life as well as art. But life is not art, and art is not life, though both The Pianist-and The Piano Teacher, in their autobiographical nature, do their best (or is it worst?) to blur the line between the two. Depending on your view of these films, each is helped or hindered by the medium of cinema itself, whose basic artisticcum-philosophical problem has always been how to make what is false or fictional seem true or real. In the case of the two adaptations under consideration, the problem, of course, is how to make what is true (or based on truth) truer-or at least not false.