Generally, I'm speaking of people whose view of the world is in some way skewed by factors that do not totally reflect their reality. Like, many people have real reasons to be depressed: their mother's dead, their father's in jail, they bounce between homes and they don't get enough food. But I'm talking here about people whose reality is pretty okay and yet their wiring is still screwy.
Like the protagonist of Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, played by Isabelle Huppert.
I have always heard The Piano Teacher discussed in hushed tones, like it was this really confrontational, difficult-to-watch film. I think that's probably accurate, but I also thought that meant it was acclaimed. And perhaps it is. But to quote Leslie Nielsen, "that's not important right now." (But while we're on the topic: It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2001, and the two leads won best actor and best actress.)
The reason it's supposed to be difficult to watch is that Huppert's character, an exacting virtuoso pianist and piano teacher by day, is into sleazy sex shops by night, and wants to be dominated sexually as well as watch other people have sex.
This isn't the part I have trouble with. Sex addiction is an addiction like any other addiction, if it is appropriate to describe the predilections of Huppert's Erika Kohut as sex addiction.
No, it's how she behaves independently of the sex addiction that I found irreconcilably odd. I won't go into all the details of her moment-to-moment interactions with the others in her life, but I do want to give one example that I think might stand in for the whole broken psychology.
Erika lives with her mother, and in a symbol of her stunted emotional state, they sleep in the same bedroom in twin beds that are next to one another. In case it's not obvious how strange this is, Huppert was either 47 or 48 when she filmed The Piano Teacher, so obviously that's about the age the character is.
At one point in the film's final third, at a moment of particularly damaged affect, she rolls over onto her mother's bed, mounts her, and frantically kisses her on the mouth, saying over and over again "I love you! I love you! I love you!" It is basically a sexual assault of her own mother.
Sorry, I just can't relate to this.
I don't mean I can't relate because I've never sexually assaulted my mother, though to be clear, I have not. I mean because it just doesn't make sense as a psychological portrait, even if she were a lesbian, which she isn't. But that still would only go a very small, superficial and irresponsibly reductive way toward explaining such an act.
Untangling the influences of a toxic parent is also a tricky exercise on screen, though I guess we could say that being damaged during your upbringing could explain almost anything that sprouts in your psychological profile later in life. But not this, right?
Plus, although the mother is clearly a nag and disapproves of what she knows, or at least suspects, her daughter is doing after hours, she isn't portrayed as specifically toxic in a way that goes beyond the ordinary concerns of a parent who might also be aging into dementia.
What I'm getting at is, this feels like a provocation by Haneke, one without the justification of having a basis in psychological reality.
And it would not be the first time Haneke had made a provocation just for the sake of it. That's what I feel about his movie Funny Games, though I've only seen the English language remake, not the original. I like to be discomfited in movies, quite a bit in fact, but Funny Games discomfited me in the wrong way, enough that I have no interest in going back to watch the original. And that's a bit how I feel about The Piano Teacher, though just to a lesser degree. (And the fact that Haneke remade Funny Games means that not only did he find it a concept worth exploring, he doubled down on it by exploring it twice.)
For a moment I considered writing about this film via a blog post I would have called "Kissing cousins," because I think Haneke is kissing cousins with Lars von Trier. They both show a sadism about women that I sometimes feel exists only to be confrontational. To be clear, both are capable of excellent work -- I love Haneke's Amour, and I love several von Trier films, including Dancer in the Dark and Melancholia -- but both have baser instincts they indulge more often than is warranted, which verge on the misogynistic. (I didn't write that post because I thought it required me to list other examples of kissing cousins directors, and honestly, I felt too lazy to undertake that, even though it's a good project.)
But I do think you have an unenviable task when you are trying to make a movie about someone who's fucked up. Surely the writer, in this case Haneke, has someone in their own life in mind when they write such a character, and is not just making up these details on the fly.
But I think of it a bit like a sports movie, which sounds like a strange comparison, but hear me out. The reason I don't love most sports movies is that I feel like I don't believe some screenwriter's crazy idea of a crazy finish to a game. I believe crazy things that happen in real sports because they actually happened. If a screenwriter just made it up, it doesn't wow me the way they obviously want it to because it just feels like a complete and utter fiction.
If I had seen a 48-year-old woman, in real life, pin down her mother and furiously kiss on her on the mouth, maybe I would believe it.
As something a screenwriter appears to have just made up, not so much.
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