The Piano (1993)
aka: La Lecon De Piano
romantic drama
directed
by : Jane Campion
featuring
: Holly Hunter - Harvey Keitel - Sam Neill - Anna Paquin - Kerry Walker
running
time : 2 hours
Writer/director Jane Campion's third feature
unearthed emotional undercurrents and churning intensity in the story of
a mute woman's rebellion in the recently colonized New Zealand wilderness
of Victorian times. Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), a mute who has willed herself
not to speak, and her strong-willed young daughter Flora (Anna Paquin)
find themselves in the New Zealand wilderness, with Ada the imported bride
of dullard land-grabber Stewart (Sam Neill). Ada immediately takes a dislike
to Stewart when he refuses to carry her beloved piano home with them. But
Stewart makes a deal with his overseer George Baines (Harvey Keitel) to
take the piano off his hands. Attracted to Ada, Baines agrees to return
the piano in exchange for a series of piano lessons that become a series
of increasingly charged sexual encounters. As pent-up emotions of rage
and desire swirl around all three characters, the savage wilderness begins
to consume the tiny European enclave. Campion imbues her tale with an over-ripe
tactility and a murky, poetic undertow that betray the characters' confined
yet overpowering emotions: Ada's buried sensuality, Baines' hidden tenderness,
and Stewart's suppressed anger and violence. The story unfolds like a Greek
tragedy of the Outback, complete with a Greek chorus of Maori tribesmen
and a blithely uncaring natural environment that envelops the characters
like an additional player. Campion directs with discreet detachment, observing
one character through the glances and squints of another as they peer through
wooden slats, airy curtains, and the spaces between a character's fingers.
She makes the film immediate and urgent by implicating the audience in
characters' gazes. And she guides Hunter to a revelatory performance of
silent film majesty. Relying on expressive glances and using body language
to convey her soulful depths, Hunter became a modern Lillian Gish and won
an Oscar for her performance, as did Paquin and Campion for her screenplay.
Campion achieved something rare in contemporary cinema: a poetry of expression
told in the form of an off-center melodrama.
Not just another costume drama,
Campion's The Piano lushly visualizes the emotional complexities of a 19th
century woman's sexual awakening. Mute in a world that silences women,
Ada has to find other means to express her responses to the untamed New
Zealand landscape, her stiff husband Stewart, and the sensualist Baines.
The elliptical narrative minimizes rational explanations in favor of visceral
and emotional effects, often structured around parallels between Ada and
the natural environment that surrounds her. While Ada's cumbersome 19th
century clothes are initially at odds with the muddy forest, Campion reveals
Ada's adaptability with a hoop skirt tent, and her reservoirs of passion
with the parallel between braids of her hair and forest vines. Stewart,
living amidst burnt-out trees, cannot fathom Ada's attachment to her piano,
while natural man Baines understands her ardor when he hears and watches
her on the open beach. Baines' piano blackmail is transformed into Ada's
only path to selfhood; it is a meeting of two rebellious minds and bodies
glimpsed voyeuristically by a culture that cannot comprehend its own erotic
instincts. Co-winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, The
Piano received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best
Director, winning Best Original Screenplay for Campion, Best Supporting
Actress for Paquin's resentful daughter, and Best Actress for Hunter's
finely tuned Ada.