Abstract
Since its release in 2001, Michael Haneke's La Pianiste has been the subject of conflicting responses and readings from various critical camps. Taking Robin Wood's 2002 critical analysis of the film as its starting point, this article explores how the film might be read as a contemporary take on the melodrama, or ‘women's film’. The two focal points of Wood's analysis—the film's reliance on a musical motif and its foregrounding of bourgeois society—can be used to situate the film within a generic context. While Haneke's film aligns itself in many ways with the melodramatic tradition, the ultimate unspoken question of the film is not, however, the taboo subject of women's sexuality (Creed), nor the capitalist relations of production and class (Kleinhans) but the spectator's relationship to modern society and to the cinematic apparatus.
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