The Pianist (A Pianista) first published by Dirty Movies for a screening at MotelX 2025
“In a near future”, as text near the beginning of Nuno Bernardo’s The Pianist (A Pianista) reads, Ana (Teresa Tavares) and her teenaged son Pedro (Gonçalo Almeida) are struggling, in different ways, to cope with the recent death of Jorge (Miguel Borges), very much the head of the Torres house. A professional pianist and music teacher, Ana pops pills and avoids her psychiatrist (Catarina Furtado), but is slowly starting to mend and making overtures to play her beloved instrument again. This involves getting Mr Lopes (Marco Paiva) from the local music shop to retune her old piano – a retuning which, given the more than merely professional interest in Ana that Pedro observes in Lopes, comes with a certain sexual subtext.
Yet harmony will not easily be restored to the Torres household. Wayward, recalcitrant and resentful, Pedro does not understand why Ana insists that they stay out in the sticks at the horse ranch that Jorge used to run, when they could just go back to more vibrant Lisbon – and he insists that Ana, for all her idealisation of Jorge’s memory, never really knew who her husband was. Certainly an impressionistic flashback suggests that Jorge was violent during sex, although it is less clear at whose instigation – which is to say that there are accommodations and ambiguities in this family, as in any. Meanwhile, news reports of a number of missing girls in the area are reinforced by posters all around town.
The “near future” setting of The Pianist allows for a sci-fi premise to run in fugue with the film’s principal theme. Jorge, it emerges, had signed up with the biotech company A New Life to have himself cryogenically preserved in the event of death – but the (unspecified) nature of his accident was such that his body was left in no condition for this treatment, and so the company proposes to Ana that his DNA be cloned instead. This high concept enables Jorge to return – full-bodied again, and with all the bullying, patriarchal machismo that had previously defined him also intact. Though initially delighted to see him come back, Ana is disturbed by the appearance of two agents (Marco Costa, Diogo C. Martins) who are investigating the local disappearances, and begins to suspect, as they do, that Jorge is – or was, and perhaps still is – a paedophile and serial sex murderer. Jorge’s own dominating behaviour, and his careful steering of Ana away from potential evidence, all create a negative picture of him, and awaken in Ana a desire to rewrite the past.
“Mum drama” is what Pedro says by way of explanation to his online friends after Ana interrupts one of his gaming sessions. His words are also a fair characterisation of The Pianist which, much as its characters conceal their identities, uses genre itself as a guise. For this medley of elements from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009) and Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool (2023) is ultimately a family melodrama (with strong psychological undercurrents), while the (lo-fi) sci-fi is just cover for some home truths and even more determined, (self-)deluding denial. As Ana goes far, and then even farther, to protect her own, Bernardo keeps us guessing what is real, and what merely wishful thinking, in this dysfunctional family of three. Here, any wrong note struck is, in the film’s broader composition, ultimately just right.
strap: History clones itself: in Nuno Bernardo’s hybrid of domestic melodrama, science fiction and psychothriller, a departed patriarch returns to the scene of the crime
Anton Bitel
