Even the most hoity-toity people like to get it on, provided the sex is properly debased, joyless, and masochistic. That seems to be the motive of the cinema of carnal loathing that has sprung up of late in Europe, spearheaded by filmmakers like Catherine Breillat, who campaigns against the pleasures of film and the flesh in À ma sœur/Fat Girl (2001) and Romance (1999), and including the likes of Coralie & Virginie Despentes’s Baise-moi (2000) and Patrice Chéreau’s affecting if squalid Intimacy (2000). Cinematic virtues or their lack aside, these films offer raw sex, moral degradation, and sordid pathology with enough intellectual pretension and pious reproach that they can avoid seeming overtly exploitative. They’re like Jerry Springer for the Charlie Rose crowd.

Michael Haneke’s adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Die Klavierspielerin ("The Pianist") is less graphic and polemical than Breillat’s films but not as humane as Chéreau’s. Nonetheless he’s done wonders with a verbose, stridently banal novel (maybe the translation I read was bad), refining away much of its sophomoric cynicism and smug racism.

In part he has Isabelle Huppert to thank. In the book her character, Erika Kohut (or "Erika K.," as Jelinek refers to her, underscoring how far removed her fiction is from the wit and profundity of Kafka), is a grotesque caricature of repression. Fortyish, single, a failed concert pianist and embittered teacher at the Vienna Music Conservatory, she lives with her equally grotesque mother (Annie Girardot) in a Punch & Judy show of co-dependency. The story in some ways seems a nerveless, distaff reworking of Psycho with its themes of voyeurism, punishment, and dread of the devouring mother (it’s the matriarchy that’s to blame here — so much for female empowerment). Jelinek’s Erika, however, is no Norman Bates; she has no secrets, and the author seems to have created her, and all the book’s characters, solely to torment and despise them.

Huppert, however, accords Erika an element of mystery. No small task, given a deadening regimen that consists of psychologically and physically damaging her students, trolling sex shops and parking lots for scopophilic thrills, tearing her mother’s hair out in another fight about clothes and privacy, and mutilating her genitals. Huppert won the Best Actress award last year at Cannes for her performance, doubtless for the way she maintains your sympathy for this cartoon sufferer of civilization and its discontents. Maybe the secret is her expression of tight-lipped disapproval, which never changes, even when she’s having her nose broken.

As always, a male interloper disrupts this feminine paradise. Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel, who won for Best Actor at Cannes), blond and cocky and about 15 years younger, pins poor Erika with his gaze as she pounds away at Schubert at a recital. He tries to break the ice with small talk about philistinism, genius, and madness, but Erika rebuffs him coldly, as she does his attempts to enroll with her for private instruction. The rest of the faculty overrules her objections, however, and Walter endures Erika’s reproaches about his poor command of dynamics, until the teacher/student relationship overturns and the refined façades shatter, for the characters and the film both.

Jane Campion could give him some Piano lessons, but to his credit, Haneke ennobles the material with stillness and restraint, allowing for some genuine ambiguity, unlike the calculated ellipses of his previous film, the overrated Code inconnu (2000). The Kafka-esque mood and motifs Jelinek fumbles at he achieves in beautifully composed scenes of oppression framed by doorways, bars, darkness, or other images of entrapment. In one miserable attempt at a tryst, Erika pursues Walter to his hockey practice at a skating rink, which is first viewed through the meshes of a goal net. She flees the humiliating aftermath, running onto the ice, slipping and being absorbed by its whiteness. Although set in Vienna, La pianiste offers no local color or scenic detail but rather an austere, almost abstract arena for its play of human folly and futility.

Sounds like a snooze, and with its plodding agenda of half-baked feminist critical theory and its thudding undercurrent of puritanical moralism and loathing of the flesh, La pianiste would never have gotten so much attention had not Haneke dropped his æsthetic pants on occasion. So every now and then, out of the blue, Erika will squat and pee, or sniff a soiled tissue, or peek at her mother’s pubic hair, or throw herself on a useless man to be utterly degraded. The arty trappings don’t disguise the titillating intent, or the film’s ultimate effect of diminishing one’s delight in sex, humanity, and movies.