The performance Mikey Madison called “one of the most incredible” in cinema history
After bagging an Oscar for Anora last year, Mikey Madison seems to have taken a slight step back from the limelight, making sure not to get too overwhelmed by the pressures of fame and success.
A role in The Social Reckoning, the sequel to David Fincher’s The Social Network, comes later this year, but in the meantime, Madison seems to be preserving her energy. “I feel like everything around me has changed, and I think that’s increasing my need to withdraw into myself,” she told Vogue Italia last summer.
So, what is there to do when you’re not jamming your schedule with movie roles and press tours? We can only imagine that Madison is watching plenty of movies during this quieter period, herself an avid cinephile who has long studied her craft via the performances of great stars.
Whether that be Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces or practically every cast member of Paris, Texas, her favourite movies have informed her approach to acting, and there’s one performance she considers a particular standout. In fact, in her Criterion Closet video, she crowned a certain role as “one of the most incredible performances by an actress in the history of cinema”.
Madison was referring to Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, a performance that really is one for the ages, following Huppert’s Erika, a lonely middle-aged music teacher who lives under the stifling conditions of her mother, secretly engaging in masochistic behaviour as a bizarre, punishing form of relief, even mutilating herself, engaging in voyeurism, and sniffing used tissues in an adult shop.
She is a tragic figure, desperate for connection but unable to comprehend a normal relationship, starting an affair with a younger student, instructing him to obey her specific requests for their sexual relationship, only for their arrangement to descend into something much more horrific.
The Piano Teacher isn’t for the faint of heart – it’s depressing, and it’s uncomfortable – but it’s truly one of the most profound pieces of filmmaking that the 21st century has to offer. Huppert’s performance is astounding, bringing so much unhinged, unrestrained energy to this uptight and troubled woman, whom we feel for in spite of the fact that she often commits some alarming acts, whether that be putting glass in her student’s pocket or attempting to make love to her own mother.
The final sequence, in which Erika stabs herself and walks out of the concert venue, leaves us with an indelible image of a woman with nowhere else to turn, and the sheer disgust and ugliness that washes over her face in that moment, only for her to remain composed and calm, is mesmerising, and Madison can’t think of a performance more impressive.
Madison concluded, “She is so intense and vulnerable, and [in] this scene where she stabs herself in the shoulder, there’s a sound that comes out of her throat, it’s so guttural, I remember watching this, and I was like, ‘I have to go back and see this one more time,’ because I kind of can’t believe that I just saw this performance. You imagine with another actress, what would they have brought to the character? But you can only picture Isabelle Huppert in this role.”
