The Piano
Jane Campion, Australia/France, 1993, 120 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)
Out of the wild, crashing grey mid-19th century seas a mute Scots woman, Ada (Holly Hunter), arrives in New Zealand with her nine-year-old daughter Flora and beloved piano. She is there to marry Stewart (Sam Neill), a husband she has never met. He leaves Ada's piano behind on the beach, claiming it difficult to carry through the dense bush that surrounds their new home. But a deal is struck between the reluctant wife and the illiterate estate manager Baines (Harvey Keitel) that he will rescue the instrument and that she is able to earn it back, a key a time, in return for sexual favours. Eventually though, pragmatism and lust give way to a passionate mutual affair that can only have dramatic and brutal consequences.
New Zealand director Jane Campion's third feature after the remarkable Sweetie and An Angel At My Table (she also made a little seen but notable TV film) comes to the screen laden with major awards and lavish praise, not least the 1993 Palme D'Or from Cannes for Best Film and a wholly deserved Best Actress gong for Hunter. In essence she is the centre of the picture, commanding attention from the opening seconds to the elegiac, curiously disturbing coda, and this despite her lack of a voice. She communicates via the written word and sign language interpreted by her daughter, even though by her own confession the muteness is self-imposed. And as Flora, the young Anna Paquin offers a performance of much richness and not altogether sympathetic passion that belies her age and serves the picture well.
No less startling, Sam Neill (last seen in Spielberg's soggy dino-fest Jurassic Park) has never been better, transforming what could so easily have been a thuggish buffoon into a vulnerable, driven to extremes through his own confusion in the face of the affair and such obvious self-possession on the part of his wife. Keitel is more problematic, his bold casting bringing with it all the attendant baggage, particularly after such a busy and spectacular year (Reservoir Dogs, Bad Lieutenant), but effectively playing against type as the passionate romantic white man gone native (even down to facial tattoos) he acquits himself with a moody elegance and all his customary skill.
Baines in particular, and the whole of this community, live hand in hand with the local Maori culture, which brings out of the piece an added depth, a sense of events bigger than the mere everyday worlds of these people, and this without sentimentalising the indigenous population nor using them as comic foils. The contrast between Stewart's trading of guns and blankets and his wife's own bargains is telling.
All the way The Piano meticulously avoids the obvious traps inherent to the costume drama, not least by turning the very costumes themselves from decoration to dramatic effect, Ada's voluminous layered skirts brilliantly used for convey both her situation (the impracticality of the bush) and her eventual liberation. And cameraman Stuart Dryburgh eschews the prettiness of the location, infusing this New Zealand not with the expected lush greens of Eden but a similar brooding shadow to that Vincent Ward so effectively brought to his own Antipodean debut, Vigil.
And above all this, as befits a film so intrinsically bound with music, soars an exquisite, deceptively subtle score by Michael Nyman that sweeps the audience along but never dictates the emotion of the piece. Indeed, this is the measure of Campion's film. The pitfalls are there, but she astutely skirts them all, the film is never melodramatic, never over-steps its period, and most crucially never milks its audience's response. From her early shorts right through to this, her oeuvre is almost entirely free of stylistic flourishes and yet everything is still somehow very much A Jane Campion Film. The dazzling Gothic romanticism of The Piano is the very best Jane Campion Film so far from this, one of the world's most outstanding of new directors.