Annie Girardot

Shock Treatment aka Traitement de Choc

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Hélène is strangled by Dr Devilers

The weird thing about Traitement de Choc, usually shown in English-speaking areas as Shock Treatment, is that it went by the title Doctor in the Nude in the UK when it was released in the early 1970s. Nothing to do with the comic novel Doctor in the Nude by Richard Gordon, the latest in his larky series about young doctors, and more to do with the fact that for one very brief moment you got to see star Alain Delon’s penis. So that’s how it got sold to British audiences, with the vaguely saucy title as some sort of come-on, because selling it any other way would have been, in the distributors’ eyes … Read more

The Piano Teacher

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Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel at the piano

Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher came out in 2001, just about halfway through his remarkable 20-year run of films starting with 1992’s Benny’s Video, ending with 2012’s Amour and taking in Funny Games, Time of the Wolf, Hidden and The White Ribbon. All of them have a pitiless, lidless-eyed quality to them, and The Piano Teacher won all the major awards at Cannes when it was shown there. That will never happen again – the rules were changed so as to spread the love a bit wider in subsequent years. It’s an unusual film for Haneke because he didn’t write it and didn’t intend to direct it. He took on Elfriede Jelinek’s novel … Read more