Madame Sousatzka believes that this boy, Manek, can be a great pianist, a virtuoso - but we, in the audience, have no objective way to know if she is a great teacher of great musicians, or just a piano teacher who is deluding herself and the boy. That doesn’t matter.
“Madame Sousatzka” is not a one-level movie in which everything leads up to the cliche of the crucial first concert. This is not a movie about success or failure; it is a movie about soldiering on, about continuing to do your best, day after day, simply because you believe in yourself - no matter what anyone else thinks. Madame believes this 16-year-old boy can be a great pianist, and that she - no one else - is the person to guide him on the right path to his destiny.
“Madame Sousatzka” is a film about her efforts to protect the boy from all of the pressures and temptations around him, while simultaneously shoring up the ruins of her own world. As played by Shirley MacLaine, in one of the best performances of the year, she is a faded, aging woman who possesses great stubbornness and conviction.
Once, long ago, she failed in her own concert debut. Her mother pushed her too fast, to soon, and she broke down in the middle of her debut concert, and fled from the stage.
That humiliation is still in her nightmares, and still shapes her attitude toward her students. They must not be allowed to perform in public until they are ready. Unfortunately, Madame is hardly ever prepared to admit they are ready, and so sooner or later all of her pupils are forced to make a break with her. Their departures have made her career a series of heartbreaks, and populated the shelves of photographs in her apartment.
Manek, her latest student, is played by Navin Chowdhry as a teenager who apart from his talent is a fairly normal young man. He travels by skateboard despite Madame’s explicit orders that he is not to endanger his hands, he enjoys playing the piano and yet is not obsessed by it, and he has a lively interest in the model (Twiggy) who lives upstairs in Madame’s eccentric rooming house. His mother (Shabana Azmi) is divorced, and supports them by making gourmet Indian pastries for the food department of Harrod’s. She has an admirer, but Manek is jealous of her boyfriend, and wants to make his concert debut so that he can support his mother - not some strange man. He is encouraged in his ambition by a predatory booking agent who overhears his playing and wants to use him immediately - creating a war of wills between Madame and her pupil.
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