Erika insists Walter study and follow to the letter a long and detailed set of instructions in which he is to subject her to bondage, pain and humiliation. Yet he remains infatuated (or maybe just curious) enough to keep playing along. Erika is unable to give herself to Walter in any conventional fashion, and her adamant refusal to play the game of love in any ordinary way infuriates and disgusts him. That composer's dynamics, she asserts, range (like her own temperament) from ''scream to whisper, not loud to soft.''īrought to the chaotic realm of sexuality, the rigid rules that help forge a great musician seem ludicrous. The two embark on an erotic journey to which Erika, in her infinite perversity, applies the same perfectionist standards she brings to her teaching of Schubert. But when he declares his passion in the conservatory's bathroom, Erika refuses to have sex. The floodgates open when Erika unexpectedly finds herself ardently pursued by a handsome, worshipful younger student, Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), who idolizes her musicianship and imagines he is in love.
In an unsettling subplot of ''The Piano Teacher,'' Erika sadistically torments a female student who also has a domineering mother. The women sleep side by side on twin beds pushed together, and during their frequent squabbles, they slap each other's faces.
That mother-daughter relationship is embattled, suffocating and incestuous in all but deed. At home, behind closed bathroom doors, she practices genital self-mutilation while her bossy, meddlesome mother (Annie Girardot), with whom she lives, prepares dinner. Erika is a compulsive voyeur who frequents pornographic bookstores and prowls drive-in movies to spy on couples having sex in cars. The biggest difference between this role and the others is her character's extreme sexual kinkiness. She has relayed similar signals in Olivier Assayas's ''Destinées,'' Benoît Jacquot's ''School of Flesh'' and Claude Chabrol's ''Ceremony,'' to name only three relatively recent films. Huppert, an icon of Gallic severity and self-containment, has portrayed an imperious woman flashing furious messages from behind a forbidding mask. Huppert a best-actress award at last year's Cannes International Film Festival, and it requires her to plunge into dangerous territory that only the most courageous actors would dare to inhabit. The largely unsympathetic role of an imperious music instructor who gives master classes at a Viennese conservatory won Ms. Stiff-backed and unsmiling, her dark eyes as opaque as cough drops, the French actress Isabelle Huppert gives one of her greatest screen performances as Erika Kohut, a haughty, sexually repressed priestess of high culture in Michael Haneke's powerfully disquieting film, ''The Piano Teacher.''
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