Only two films carry the distinction of winning three awards at the Cannes Film Festival.  The first was the Coen brothers' Barton Fink, and the second – Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher – is likely to vex just as many people as Fink did 11 years ago.  Historically, juries at Cannes tend to choose films that are dark and disturbing (which might explain why the lighthearted Amélie wasn't even accepted to last year's event), and Teacher is probably the darkest, most disturbing offering yet.  At minimum, it just might be the all-time worst First Date Film.

A thrilling tale of self-destruction via repression, Teacher stars Isabelle Huppert (The School of Flesh) as Erika Kohut, the Schubert-loving Masters Piano Class professor at a Vienna conservatory for extremely gifted teenage musicians.  Erika is in her late 30s and still lives with her domineering mother (Annie Girardot), who presumably rides her daughter because she never lived up to the promise exhibited as a youngster.  The film opens with a scene depicting Erika being hollered at because she came home from work three hours late and had the audacity to spend her own money on some new clothes.

Erika's messed-up maternal relationship translates into a whole lot of bad news for her students, who receive the brunt of their teacher's focused, misguided rage.  She's extremely tough on them, often ripping multiple assholes at a time while labeling her charges as pathetic and suggesting they'll be lucky to find careers tickling the ivories at a strip club.  We begin to see a slightly different side of Erika when cocksure new student Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel) clumsily tries to seduce her.  He's a brash young engineering student who isn't really at all serious about the piano, which irks Erika and sends her spiraling into a shocking cycle of reckless behavior that includes self-mutilation, public urination and recklessly endangering the career of her most promising student, as well as something involving the used wads of tissue found on the floor of a private booth in an adult bookstore.  And that's all before she finally succumbs to Walter and provides what might be cinema's creepiest sex scene since Dennis Hopper rode Isabella Rosellini into nitrous-fueled oblivion in Blue Velvet.

Klemmer does a decent job (he was Cannes Best Actor), but Teacher is brought to life by Huppert (Cannes Best Actress), whose perpetual scowl is perfectly cast in Erika's oddly unemotional role.  The character is incredibly prim, proper and wrapped so tightly by various issues that no emotion would ever think of trying to escape...until she begins to unravel and reveal her true colors.  Huppert does this all flawlessly, and were it not for Teacher being a somewhat controversial foreign film released early in the year, she'd be a shoo-in for next year's Oscar race.

Speaking of controversy, Teacher garnered just as much of it as the sex-crazed dramas Baise-moi, Intimacy and Romance, but it managed to do so without nudity (save what you see on the monitor in the private booth scene).  You really have to salute writer-director Haneke (he adapted Elfriede Jelinek's novel) for making a film that isn't nearly as graphic but much more powerful, brutally shocking and difficult to watch.  I felt like taking a shower after Baise-moi, but Teacher made me want to scrub down with a stiff wire brush and an industrial-strength detergent.

If Teacher were an American film, it would have been made in a way where the audience would be railroaded into feeling sympathy for Erika (and if Ron Howard had made it, people would think it was the greatest film since Patch Adams).  Haneke doesn't pull any punches and, as a result, earned himself a second straight Cannes Jury Prize (following the spectacularly unseen Code Unknown with Juliette Binoche).

2:10 -