CRUELTY AND DELIGHT IN EQUAL MEASURE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

ANYONE WHO'S EVER suffered under a martinet music instructor has no doubt fantasized about what an unhappy, repressed and twisted personal life their tormentor deserved. These people are really going to love ``The Piano Teacher.''

So, too, will fans of the incomparable French actress Isabelle Huppert and European theater-of-cruelty cinema (the movie won the top acting awards and the grand jury prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival). Even they may find stretches of it hard to take, but abundant rewards are there for viewers who can tune into them.

Directed in Vienna (but in French) by Austrian master of disturbance Michael Haneke (``Funny Games''), this odd mix of Schubert and sadomasochism is actually less explicit than a lot of the continent's recent psychosexual exports. But for many, Haneke's visual discretion will mean little; the perverse and degrading places the film visits are accessible only via visas stamped open mind, sympathetic heart and, in the end, strong stomach.

In what may well be the most accomplished performance of her formidable career, Huppert marshals all of her subtle actorly prowess: gait, stance, that less-is-everything aggressive impassivity of hers and, of course, the inimitable death-ray gaze create a universe of meaning. This may well be her most indelible portrait of pent-up frustration, rage and self-negation leaking through the seams of a controlled and haughty persona.

Huppert's Erika Kohut, who teaches at one of the music capital's most prestigious conservatories, is a 40-ish loner whose only relationship of any significance is with her neurotic, manipulative mother (Annie Girardot), with whom she shares not only an apartment but a bedroom. A witheringly critical taskmistress with her students (and easily threatened to the point of cruelly sabotaging ones who show more talent than she does), Erika seems every bit the bitter, brainy spinster.

But boy, does she have a secret life. In the few hours she can steal from her instructional rounds and her mother's prying eyes, Erika visits porn shops, peeps on couples at drive-in movies, mutilates her genitals and collects equipment for the bondage session of her vivid and detailed dreams. All of these impulses and more have been stored in the relative safety of Erika's head for God knows how many years. But when a gifted and charming young man, Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), becomes enchanted with her, Erika sees only an opportunity for her darkest erotic wishes to come true. What results becomes a full-blown nightmare for all involved.

Although based on a novel that author Elfriede Jelinek has indicated explored some of her own family-based dysfunctions, the movie sometimes plays like a disgruntled student's revenge fantasy. Additionally, the idea of a high-culture maven getting bent by frustration and then opportunity is a stereotype that goes back a long way - at least 72 years in film, to Sternberg's ``Blue Angel.''

But Haneke's distinctive approach to the material lends it a vital fascination. Keeping most of the action indoors, he creates a limited environment for Erika's thoughts to simmer and mutate. And when she does finally act on them, it's more often than not just outside the camera frame or (and this is merciful) blocked from our sight by a well-placed glove or thigh. It's a fully developed visual strategy that both protects our sensibilities and triggers our imaginations.

And it's only when she gets someone else involved in her funny games that this safe space is violently violated - and any judgment of Erika we've built up over the course of this grueling, astounding movie melts into strange, profoundly cathartic commiseration.

THE PIANO TEACHER - Three stars

(Not rated: glimpses of hard-core sex, nudity, violence, language)

Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Benoit Magimel, Annie Girardot.

Director: Michael Haneke.

Running time: 2 hr. 10 min.

Playing: Nuart, West L.A.