The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 16-22
The Piano Teacher (2001)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Haneke uses the gaze of Isabelle Huppert and frames her face to fully transmit that his portrait is of a lady who’s not right in the head. Huppert’s close-ups, most of them reactions to things that we only ultimately glimpses (if we see them at all), show that Haneke doesn’t need to show us more than those little demonstrations of self-harm to construct the relationship between Huppert’s piano teacher and her student, which descends into an exploration of consent, sanity and the limits of pleasure. A perfect companion piece to Elle. Jaime Grijalba (November 19, 5:15pm at the Metrograph’s Huppert tribute)