
            Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a piano professor at a Vienna music conservatory. Although already in her forties, she still lives in an apartment with her domineering mother (Annie Girardot); her father is a long-standing resident in a lunatic asylum. Throughout the film, the audience is gradually shown truths about Erika's private life. Behind her assured façade, she is a woman whose sexual repression verges into full-fledged desperation and is manifested in a long list of paraphilias, including (but by no means limited to) voyeurism and sadomasochistic fetishes such as sexual self-mutilation.Upon meeting Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), a charming 17-year-old engineering student from a bourgeois background, they begin to obsess one another. Even though she initially attempts to prevent consistent contact and even tries to undermine his application to the conservatory, he eventually becomes her pupil. Like her, he appreciates and is a gifted (if distinct) interpreter of Schumann and Schubert.She destroys the musical prospects of an insecure but talented girl, Anna Schober, driven by her jealousy of the girl's contact with Walter -- and also, perhaps, by her fears that Anna's life will mirror her own. She does so by hiding shards of glass inside one of her coat pockets, permanently damaging Anna's hands and ruining her aspirations to play at the forthcoming jubilee concert. Erika is then wholly sympathetic when the girl's mother (Susanne Lothar) asks for advice on her daughter's recuperation. (The sub-plot of the pupil and her mother, mirroring the main relationship in the film, is absent in Jelinek's novel.) In what clearly qualifies, at that point of the film, as dramatic irony, the girl's mother rhetorically asks Erika who could do something so evil.Walter is increasingly insistent in his desire to start a relationship with her. But when she finally acquiesces, Walter is unwilling to indulge her violent fantasies, which repulse him. The film climaxes, however, when he finally does. He attacks her in her apartment in the fashion she let him know she desired, violently raping her as she lies prostrate after receiving a beating from him. She discovers, finally, that the reality of her desires does not match her conception of them.Shortly thereafter, minutes before the concert in which she is supposed to fill in for Anna, Erika tries to enact some speculable form of revenge or call of attention on Walter, and when confronted with his hypocritical, smug indifference she puts a knife into herself and promptly leaves the auditorium. Her onscreen injury is not severe, but the implications of the whole ending scene leave it clear to the audience that more serious self-inflicted harm is a matter of course.
    

The Piano Teacher


            
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Little White Lies

Standing Tall

Intimate Enemies

Marseille

Life Is a Long Quiet River

Lola

A Single Girl

For a Woman

The Bridesmaid

Carbon

To Matthieu

Headwinds

Memoir of War


            War correspondent Elsa Casanova is taken hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Faced with her imminent execution, a Special Forces unit is dispatched to her rescue. In some of the worlds most breathtaking yet hostile landscapes, a relentless pursuit begins between her kidnappers who have no intention of letting their prey escape them and a group of commando who risk their lives in pursuit of their single aim to bring her home alive. This strong, independent woman and these men of duty are thrown together and forced to confront situations of great danger that inextricably bind them emotionally, violently and intimately.
    

Special Forces


            A French TV weather girl is torn between an older man - a famous married author whom she loves but who won't leave his wife - and the semi-deranged young heir to an industrial fortune who loves her. In the end she gets married to the younger man, but he starts to become obsessed with her love for his rival.
    

A Girl Cut in Two

Fair Play

Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse


            This is the French "Top Gun" circa 2005, and the title would be better translated "The Knights of the Sky"."Walk'n" Marchelli (Benoît Magimel) and "Fahrenheit" Vallois (Clovis Cornillac) are given an assignment to shoot down a rogue Mirage 2000 that has been hijacked by a secret French agency to test preparedness in a post-9/11 France during a Farnborough Air Show. Walk'n shoots down the plane after it locks onto his wing-man, and they are promptly side-lined and ostracised by the French air Force authorities and 'forced' to train two female pilots from the USA. Stopped from flying with a commercial airline, 'Walk'n" and "Fahrenheit" sign on to that "Special Missions" organisation, that then gets them into a series of situations in which their expertise and moral fibre are tested further.Notably, they fly a race against a flight of F-16s. The flight of three Mirage in which they are flying is forced to the ground and taken captive by mercenaries after an air-to-air refuelling plane is hijacked. They watch one of their fellow pilots be killed, and a female pilot is carried off. They escape: while Walk'n is giving a lesson to a renegade pilot, he disables that man and then activates the ejection seat, lands and picks up Fahrenheit. They straff and destroy one of the other planes before escaping. Meanwhile, one aircraft is disassembled and returned to the Paris region. It then takes off from a disused airfield to join a fly-over of Bastille Day celebrations at which there is also a major European meeting of heads of state.The two heroes work out what is happening, return to the flight line, and join the fly-past to find the rogue aircraft. The 'lost' female pilot is in it, now revealed as a terror sympathiser all along. She ejects, and Walk'n shoots down the plane after waiting for it to leave the built-up area and go over an area of forest within the Paris metropolitan area.Walk'n gets the girl: the "Special Missions" operative.The pace is 'fast', and the characters and the air-to-air photography is 'authentic'.
    

Benoît Magimel

Benoît Magimel Movies or Tv Shows (upto Jun 2025) - Watch Online

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Benoît Magimel

Benoît Magimel Movies or Tv Shows (upto Jun 2025) - Watch Online

Your region:USA

Fan Zone

Benoît Magimel's Movies and Tv Series available to Stream now ..

Your region:
USA