Publisher's Synopsis
Three French dramas starring Isabelle Huppert. Huppert gives an award-winning performance as a repressed, masochistic music teacher in Michael Haneke's 'The Piano Teacher' (2001). Erika Kohut (Huppert) teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory, lives with her domineering mother (Annie Girardot), and privately engages in a series of degrading, masochistic acts. When one of her new students, the handsome Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), tries to seduce her, Erika is first startled, but then agrees to the affair if it can be conducted on her own terms. What happens next threatens to make her self-destructive impulse even stronger. In 'Merci Pour le Chocolat' (2000), Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis) is a young musician who discovers that she may have been the daughter of famous pianist Andre Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) following a clerical error at the maternity hospital. She seeks out Polonski and his wife Mika (Huppert) who welcome her at first, and she becomes her father's adoptive pupil. However, on entering the family Jeanne starts to uncover dark secrets about Mika's past. In 'Gabrielle' (2005), wealthy French couple Jean (Pascal Greggory) and Gabrielle (Huppert) live a comfortable life in their Paris home, their every whim catered for by servants. On the surface, they are the matrimonial ideal - but beneath the veneer they live a desperate, forced co-existence, loveless and chaste. An anniversary celebration is marred by Jean's discovery of a note from Gabrielle saying she has gone to be with a lover. His world in ruin, he awaits her return - whereupon the couple look back at the highs and lows of their relationship.
