Tag Archives: Annie Girardot

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Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory prestigious music school in Vienna. In her early forties and single, she lives with her overprotective and controlling mother in a hermetically sealed world of love-hate and dependency, where there is no room for men. Her sex life consists of voyeurism and masochistic self-injury. Lonely and alienated, Erika finds solace by visiting sex shops and experimenting with masochism. Ata a recital, she befriends Walter, a handsome young man, whom she seduces and with whom she begins an illicit affair. As Erika slowly drifts closer to the brink of emotional disorder, she uses the love-stricken Walter to explore her darkest sado-masochistic fantasies, which eventually lead to her undoing. Read More »

A modest Neapolitan man meets a young woman with excessive hairiness. He exhibits her at fairs and marries her.It is after marriage that he receives a tempting offer from a French manager. Read More »

During a Post-Apocalyptic period in the near future the majority of the European population has been wiped out by some sort of undefined plague. Cino and Dora, a young couple, are rounded up by what constitutes the authorities on an isolated temporary base. They are examined and given antibiotics which will protect them for six months, told to pick out a deserted house to live in the area, and use that time to conceive a child. They are later visited by an enigmatic group of black-clothed, initially threatening vigilantes who are evidently satisfied with the couple when they hear that a child is contemplated. However, despite her evident fondness for Cino, Dora is reluctant to try to conceive a baby. Then their domestic tranquility is interrupted by a beautiful French interloper who seems as if she is more than willing to fill in for Nora and conceive Cino’s children. Read More »

Synopsis
In the course of her career, Françoise Gailland has earned herself a reputation as a formidable medical practitioner, highly respected at the Paris hospital where she works. But this professional success has come at a price. She has neglected her family, to the extent that she is virtually estranged from her husband and teenage children. When she is diagnosed with lung cancer, Françoise decides to set the record straight, whilst she still has time… Read More »

Synopsis:
For some time now, women coming home at night have been savagely murdered by a mysterious serial killer. Inspector Lagrume thinks he has found the culprit in the person of Barberot, a local butcher. But Maigret, who takes over the investigation, is not convinced. Deep inside himself, he knows the murderer is still at large. But how to trap him ? Read More »

Studies of various married couples, who under Italian law as it stands, are unable to be freed from a painful and unhappy marriage. Read More »

Quote:
Michael Haneke’s latest torture mechanism is less funny game than daunting debasement ritual. Isabelle Huppert stars as Erika Kohut, an icy piano teacher who goes masochistic when handsome young Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel) wants to play with her cold ivory. Huppert responds to Haneke with such straight-faced precision that you might just buy into the director’s seemingly shallow provocations. Spousal punishment in Bergman’s Cries & Whispers came in the form of self-mutilation. Haneke, though, has Huppert paint a more squeamish picture of self-love that also contemplates the possibility of pleasure in pain. The director has an uncanny ability to force the spectator’s gaze and takes his time revealing Erika’s many fetishes. Though all-powerful in the classroom, Erika is slapped around by her busybody mother as if she were a constantly misbehaving child. Read More »