The Piano Teacher

Haneke and Isabelle Huppert make one of cinema's coldest, most exact studies of repression: a woman who has organized her entire interior life around control, and who pursues her own degradation as though it were the only door left out of herself. Huppert plays it without a flicker of self-pity, which is what makes it unbearable. The film never excuses, never explains away, never softens — it simply observes, with clinical patience, a person colliding with the gap between what she wants and what she can survive wanting. It is difficult on purpose, and one of the great performances.