Mini

I think at its core, this film is even more intimate and unsettling thank you think. A portrait of a fractured mother - daughter relationship and the ways in which womanhood and sexuality can be distorted. Erika is not just a sexually repressed woman. I think she's suffered alot under her mothers domination, so much so that it's affected her view on love and sexuality. Her relationship with her mother is invasive, infantilizing, and emotionally violent. They share an apartment and sleep in the same bed. I think that's a direct metaphore; they also share space mentally, in which autonomy is not existent nor valid. The mother’s control is so overbearing, it seeps into every part of Erika’s life. Her career, her routines, even her body. Being in that kind of space, both literally and mentally, sexuality can't develop naturally. For Erika it's something hidden, shameful and far off from reality. I think it became most obvious how she views herself and her sexuality in thet scene in the bathroom where she harms herself. She isolates herself in the bathroom. She undresses, then cuts herself in an intimate area. There is a lack of feeling any release though. It's more like an attempt to feel anything at all, she's deeply disconnected from her own body (and sense of intimacy.) The film does treats Erika’s sexual behavior as a consequence. Her voyeurism, consumption of pornography, and compulsive habits feel like symptoms of deprivation rather than actual desire. She is both drawn to and repulsed by sexuality. There is no intimacy in her experiences, only distance and control. Pornography, in this context, becomes a substitute for connection. It is detached and devoid of vulnerability. She's so starved to experience sex and intimacy but can only seek it out in porn. The film is so powerful cause it doesn’t offer explanations or redemption. Erika’s attempt to engage in a real relationship with Walter exposes just how incompatible she is with mutual desire. She approaches intimacy as something scripted and external. It is shaped more by what porn she has consumed rather than what she genuinely feels. In many ways, she does not truly know what she likes. Her understanding of desire is filtered through pornography and the dynamics she has internalized from her mother. Control, submission and (emotional) punishment. Rather than actually discovering intimacy, she tries to replicate this already known pattern. I guess it's sort of comforting, since it's the only way of love she knows or can recognize. That's what makes any healthy relationship with Walter basically impossible. One of the my favourite scenes is when Erika secretly slips shards of glass into her students coat. Out of jealousy. For something as small as Walter comforting her. It’s a quiet, almost invisible act of violence, but it reveals so much. I think at it's core this moment is a representation of her deep resentment toward innocence and freedom. The girl represents everything Erika never had, emotional independence, a chance at a healthy sexuality and love life, and a future not defined by repression. I think that resentment was festering inside her for lomger than she liked Walter though. That was just the moment it got too much, that interaction with Walter was her breaking point in regards to the girl/her student (forgot her name, sorry). In a way, 'the piano teacher' is a study of womanhood under constraints. It asks what happens when a woman is denied agency over her own body and desires for so long that she no longer knows how to experience them in a healthy way. The film refuses to romanticize suffering too, which I apprechiate alot. It shows how cycles of control and emotional neglect can deform identity itself. Ultimately, it is not just a film about sexuality - it is about the absence of it in its most human sense. Love is replaced with control, and desire has nowhere safe to exist. Erika a warning of what emotional and sexual deprivation can become when it is left to grow in silence. Also this is the most incredible acting performance, but I'm never watching it again.

gotta thank his daughter for recommending the glasses