I watched La Pianiste or The Piano Teacher.  What strikes me is the poisonous quality in which repressed desire dulled by lack of understanding or shame is quickly attenuated and becomes something cruel.  Violence mimics the first physical passions of copulation, not to speak of copulation informed by other emotions.  Voyeurism becomes a point with which to access the physical abandon of copulation.  From her voyeurism and desire to pee or cause herself pain, Huppert's character transmutes the hopeless urge and the desperate finality in her life with a kind of beastly desire to feel an urgency of any kind, a violence that mimics the emotions or rituals of sex.  The violent visual of a woman only servicing and not being touched itself becomes a grotesque and the smelly cloth she holds up to her nose, all are a marker of the taboo and the ripping apart of the previous innocence and lack of intimacy.  Her lack of privacy, her hopelessness and her tight repression further distances the act as a violent rushing that is taboo.  She takes a razor to her much as people "hurt themselves to feel."  As the door is shut on a commonplace sexuality, the crack in her character's joyless, stentorian veneer as a teacher and the spoiled, predatory relationship with her mother at home overwhelms the space she allotted to her shame and lack of experience.  Her fascination with the simple and physical sensuality of the adolescents in the food court and the animal act in the drive in movie keeps her at the basic level, where the act is taboo and purely satisfying to the damaged id.  Her character is sociopathic in her cruelty, sometimes childlike when she sprinkles crushed glass into her student's coat after watching her young man comfort her.  And markedly without compassion or relaxation.  The moment of functional copulation is stolen from her in the her language, the violence and dysfunctionality with which she indirectly accessed a pantomime of sex.  Her young man falls, first from disgust and simply giving up on this woman with more mental problems than she's worth, to a violent adoption, a hopeless adoption of her own language.  Her understanding of sex through violence does not prepare her for the cruelty, violation, and abandonment that is copulation on her own terms.  Merely, from not having been touched, she only registers sensuality through being beaten.  These are the metaphors, the proxy of the mimicry of sex, its violence, tendency to ravage, unite, and unleash.  Her cruelty stems from not allowing herself to experience the acuteness of physical pleasure, whose intensity can be mimicked by physical pain, expressing urges and thus transcending them into a version of adult love. She first services the man the way she sees in her movies to mimic the animal violence of the love she sees and also to avoid being touched.  Control and the setting of masochistic ground rules keeps copulation in the dirty model she learned from various sources, rather than his somewhat more experienced rote blandishments.  Her perversion of the copulation act due to repression scares him.  The desire to be hurt, thrown around, made to serve, beaten, but not touched in a way that catapults her into vanilla procreation, that strips away the veneer and sexual holograms she held in fascination during her perceived virginity.  As her sexuality molders in spinster adolescence, her relationship with her mother is controlling, co-dependent, and adolescent.  Two women separated by no wall slowly eating each other alive.  Though she appears to test her young man and claim that she doesn't love him, the fact that he not only rebuffs her, but says that her urges repulse him, hurt her and cause her to transfer or displace a storm of her misdirected sexuality to her mother, acting out a passion of emotion she might feel for him.  Offense, the desire not to be left like an outmoded toy, and knowledge of a love opportunity completely frittered away by her cold exterior possibly motivate the silent and frightening attempt tto pin her mother.  The adolescent image of copulation, when it is still taboo, is shrouded in mystery and mostly physical like the subject of her voyeurism.  As personal experience increases, the alchemy of sexual experience and the gamut of emotions and complexity it allows one to access becomes manifest.  As the young man again rebuffs her and her experience with him at the concert, she is, despite her sociopathy and compulsive behavior due to long drought, kicked away like a puppy.  She responds again with violent misdirection, perhaps desiring to knife him instead, perhaps to take him again or otherwise express the betrayal that his supposed love made so easy, by hurting herself in a place other than her lady parts and her heart, that she both wants to fill and stab away. 

The desire is passive aggressive, unused to, inexperienced in, and not expecting the rote maneuvers of courtship, it deviates to the perverse which is also the safe.  Copulation in the imagination becomes a dark, movie-like, mysterious, and wholly physical act.  Other women are safe and her mother is both taboo and easy to find, the theaters she goes to require an exchange of money and no contact with a human being, the slapping, humiliation, the providing of pleasure to another does not satisfy, but merely distract from or mimic the hunger, just like taking a razor to herself to avoid touching herself.  All is painful, but in terms of sexual taking, prim. 

Her character is not only an archetype of rankling, spoiled, spinster hunger that still longs for the "7 Minutes In Heaven" happiness promised, stuck in the moment before despoiling.   She does not resemble an un-innocent Gerty Farish type of character who distracts from, but still longs for the happiness of pressure and courtship.  Her sociopathic actions, as they cascade on each other, urge the unexplainable.  They do not fully demand compassion from the audience, but they beckon understanding.  Why, the audience asks, is she doing this, and her silent actions and quiet avowals of motive are all the audience has to go by.  We are not called to pity her, but we are called to observe and begin to piece together the great tearing damage of her person.