At the end of the film, Walter forces himself on her. Screenshot from The Piano Teacher
At the end of the film, Walter forces himself on her. Screenshot from The Piano Teacher

I watched the French film The Piano Teacher back in high school. At the time it didn’t move me much — I let the plot drift past in a kind of daze, and simply thought the woman in the film was a thoroughgoing pervert. Most people who analyze it from a sociological or psychological angle arrive at the same conclusion. The “love” depicted in the film was something I couldn’t understand — I might even say it wasn’t love at all.

But looking at it now, this is a film about “love” — though it’s a love far removed from anything psychology could ever account for, utterly different from the love described in literature, and nothing like the love society demands of us, centered on lineage and reproduction. This love is the female protagonist’s own subjective experience, and that makes it exceedingly rare and precious.

A piano teacher in her forties, her clothing and daily life strictly controlled by her mother. She is musically gifted, a strict and excellent teacher, yet utterly unremarkable in ordinary life. She experiences her sexuality by cutting her own labia with a razor blade and watching the blood, or by renting pornographic films, sniffing tissues with the rank scent of semen, and sneaking peeks at couples having sex at the drive-in to console herself.

A music student (Walter) falls in love with her, and is tormented by her in turn. She demands that he treat her sadistically; in the end he does, but it brings him none of the pleasure it’s supposed to. This pitiable teacher, in the film’s final scene, plunges a small knife she always carries into her own body and disappears into the street.

Is she a pervert? Is her love wrong? That’s the question I keep turning over.

Everyone has their own way of loving, and on that level, there is no right or wrong. He loves her, and she loves him in her own way — so it is right. What most people fail to notice is another kind of perversion: that everyone follows the script written in books, meeting someone at some corner of the city, falling for each other, marrying, having children, growing old together. Not everyone realizes that this perverse, terrifying ritual is itself something many people regard as deep “happiness.”

I would say love is, without question, an utterly willful thing — especially when you are facing true love: love that is eternal, that never grows old.