Erika conducts her lessons within a cool, white-walled room and speaks to her students with the brusque impatience of a chatelaine addressing a dim domestic. Not once do we hear a word of praise escape her lips, and towards her neediest pupil (Anna Sigalevitch) she behaves with an almost military sternness. The Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke trains his camera on Huppert's pale, watchful face for long, long moments, as if waiting for her to relax. The most he ever catches, for a while at least, is a twitch of her pursed lips. When Erika plays piano before a small gathering in an opulent Viennese drawing room, one senses control but little pleasure in her performance; there is something hard and humourless in the set of her mouth, to the point that even acknowledging applause seems to be a drag for her (it may actually oblige her to smile). The applause is loudest of all from a young fellow pianist named Walter Klemmer (Beno?Magimel), who claps just a shade too long at the end of the recital and presents himself to Erika with boyish keenness. "Where do you get such unfashionable enthusiasm?" she responds dryly.
Unruffled, Walter applies to the conservatory, requesting Erika as his first-choice tutor – a compliment that leaves her typically unimpressed. What on earth does it take to give this woman a thrill?We find out. Up to this point, Haneke has set his protagonist squarely within the milieu of upper middle-class Vienna, and his elegant compositions and careful framing accentuate the fastidious regime that has seemingly become her life. So when we see her enter a porno emporium, buy a ticket and instal herself in a booth, the suddenness of the transition gives us a start.
What – this prim matron gets her kicks from the fleshy writhings of hardcore? Before you can say "chacun ?on go? she picks up a discarded tissue from the bin and holds it to her nose as if it were a posy. If this is her safety-valve, the outlet for all that feeling she represses outside her mother's company – well then, why not? Whatever gets you through the night, as the song goes.Yet the currents run deeper and darker than we imagine. Haneke appears to be making a joke when he shows Erika in her bathroom taking a razor blade to her genitals and, while the blood trickles down the porcelain, her mother calling from the kitchen, "Dinner's ready" But it's not a joke you feel inclined to laugh at. Similarly, there's something slightly farcical, something Jim Carrey-ish, about Erika sneaking up on a parked car, gazing at the copulating couple inside and then squatting down to pee in a spasm of sexual excitement. Where this is leading to isn't certain, but then certainty is the last thing Haneke wants to offer his audience; he has already given us what is possibly the most elusive movie of the year in Code Unknown.
