Anyway--here's two masterful movies about bona-fide perverse people and fetishes.

THE PIANO TEACHER

In Michael Haneke’s THE PIANO TEACHER, the taciturn piano teacher cites Schubert and Schumann as her two favorite composers. Both German, both “Romantics” both tortured in art and life—the composers are apt choices for this cinematic creature. Schubert, the bigger genius, outward bohemian and poet, was Schumann’s greatest admirer. Schumann cried over Schubert’s death at 31 and later went insane, dying in an asylum at 46. Schumann said he could not talk about Schubert unless he spoke “to the trees and the stars.”

Schubert worship runs through Haneke’s picture as teacher Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) instructs in Schubert’s dynamics from “scream to whisper, not loud to soft.” Such is her disposition, and, like Schumann, she, the outwardly ordered woman, is inwardly screaming—one step away from the nuthouse herself, where, as we learn in passing, her father resides.

But that’s only one aspect to Haneke’s intensely complex study of a woman living on the precipice. As with all of Haneke’s philosophical “horror” pictures from BENNY’S VIDEO to the brilliant, terrifying FUNNY GAMES to CODE UNKNOWN, there’s a consistent theme of claustrophobia and perversion—perversion of not only the characters, but also of audiences wishing to lap it up and beg for more (master). But Haneke wants you to think why you’re salivating, and, almost, punishes you for doing so. He likes to rattle your brain, making you long ruminate on what you’ve just witnessed. THE PIANO TEACHER may be his most powerfully unsettling, erotic and at times, comic film.

THE PIANO TEACHER has the 40-ish Erika still living with her unpleasant mother (Annie Giradot) in a relationship so antagonistic, unhealthy and uh, close that the two still share a bed. And you’ll see what that’s like through the course of the film. Erika is a distinguished professor at a prestigious Viennese school who’s worshipped but feared as she harshly criticizes students: “A wrong note in Beethoven is better than a bad interpretation.”

But she’s a loner with some pretty intriguing outlets for her sexuality. Trolling sex shops, sitting in the booths to smell the refuse left by horny patrons, she’s more than just a repressed female seeking release—she’s a sadist as well. And there’s something proud about her thrills that, amid the beautiful classical piano music works some convoluted ideas about the human condition. Gorgeous depravity or rather, is anything truly exalting unless you’ve seen the sullied?

When a handsome young student, Walter (Benoit Magimel), becomes interested in her musically and sexually, he falls hard for the seemingly placid teacher. He changes a public performance of a Schoenberg piece to Schubert just for her (and that is quite a difference—modern discordance to Romanticism), and she begins to test his limits of sexuality, specifically in a masterful sequence in the conservatory’s bathroom where a bizarre, painful dance of erotic control commences.

If you’ve thought you’ve seen female desire on film, than you haven’t seen THE PIANO TEACHER. This may be the only film one can think of where the protagonist is something of a lurker, a sadist/masochist (in one scene she puts broken glass in a student’s coat pocket; in another she cuts her vagina in the bathtub) and yet, she is oddly sympathetic.

In one of film’s bravest performances, Huppert creates a character of such intrigue and bottomless depth that we can’t possibly crack her. Though something of a female pervert, she remains reserved—acting through pinched, near non-expressions that explode into manias. She’s frightening, and though a lover of Romantic music, anything but romanticized. Subversive, meditative and poetic, THE PIANO TEACHER is a daring work of sexually strange, unmitigated genius.

CRASH

A survived car accident is one of the most exciting, hallucinatory events in a person's life, and not simply because of life endangerment and pain. Time is sped up, then suspended; physical and mental sensations are heightened, blurring reality. Life feels strangely, in the moment but dazzlingly surreal. And yet, a car accident is such a common occurrence that when we drive by one we frequently do so with a titillated, detached interest.

Inside cars, those speeding microcosmic shelters, we see distinct personalities—aggressive, meek, and distracted—the potential of which Godard envisioned in his maddeningly extraordinary car wreck loop WEEK END. To enter these personal realms, we act in mildly subversive ways—honking at a trucker, making an enraged cutoff, flirting on the freeway. Arranging this entry erotically so as to combine man with machine with sex is less familiar. But perversions often rear up in mundane environments, especially ones surrounded by seat belts, door locks and steel.

David Cronenberg, the auteur known for turning "safe" environments (apartment complexes, hospitals, the gynecologist) into terrifying, erotic and reality shaking locales, enters the world of the automobile and stretches its “normalcy” tenfold. Adapted from J.G. Ballard’s masterly novel, CRASH is a rare picture with unconventional plotting. Cronenberg constructs the exposition, action and conclusion (as well as its subtext) through sex scenes, scenes that open and flower—or, depending on your viewpoint; grow increasingly perverse—throughout the film’s short running time.

James Spader plays TV-commercial producer James Ballard, who is introduced to the auto-erotic world of the peculiar scientist Vaughan (Elias Koteas) by Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) a woman he meets via a near-fatal car accident, and with whom he first experiences the automobile’s turn on potential. James, his wife Catherine (the strikingly icy Deborah Kara Unger) and Remington join Vaughan and his subculture of dazed crash survivors, including Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), a walking Helmut Newton-esque fetish doll of scars, leg braces and support suits. They swap partners not only to satisfy their craving for dangerous, pulse-quickening sex, but also for an exploration of what J.G. Ballard calls “psychic fulfillment.”

From its opening shot—Catherine laying her breast on the cold wing of an airplane—CRASH immediately expresses its alignment of technology and the human body, a physical relationship that occurs daily, though we don't often notice it. Vaughan leads James and Catherine to a sexual awakening with their mechanical connections, infusing their human relationship with the charge its lost through deadened senses and alienation. There are negative ramifications to these people’s sometimes repulsive acts, but there is also a broadened knowledge of the world around them and the creation of a strange beauty through their meticulously visual orchestrations.

Like the conventional contact between two cars, the movie’s sex is rarely face-to-face, revealing the couple’s disconnections, but also the idea that they’re stretching toward something. As the film unfolds, James’ desire builds into perversion yet somehow also becomes more personal: After Catherine’s rough coupling with Vaughan in a car wash (the scene’s commingling of cleaning fluids, sperm, car seats and human skin is the movie’s best visualization of J.G. Ballard’s language), James kisses her bruises with a tenderness previously unexpressed. At this moment, when we see that the couple is truly in love, we grapple with both the benefit of their experience and its implications; questions that we cannot immediately answer bubble to the surface.

Is CRASH a cautionary tale about people so numbed by the modern world that they must seek excitement in dangerous measures? Is it commenting on our dissatisfied consumer society? Is it simply a turn-on? The answers are yes and no. Though the novel’s relentless descriptions of bodily fluids and organs coalescing with twisted steel (“his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered forever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine”) are rendered less graphic by Cronenberg, J.G. Ballard’s vision of the “liberation of human and machine libido” remains potently intact. In both novel and film form, CRASH takes a non-moral and non-celebratory approach to its subject matter, creating an alternative perception of the physical world that is as beautiful as its is horrific. And that amalgamation, is, to put it simply, very, very sexy.