The Piano

Programme Notes

From a review by Roger Ebert [Read the full review here]

The Piano is as peculiar and haunting as any film I've seen. It tells a story of love and fierce pride, and places it on a bleak New Zealand coast where people live rudely in the rain and mud, struggling to maintain the appearance of the European society they've left behind. It is a story of shyness, repression and loneliness; of a woman who will not speak and a man who cannot listen, and of a wilful little girl who causes mischief and pretends she didn't mean to.

Campion has never made an uninteresting or unchallenging film (her credits include Sweetie, about a family ruled by a self-destructive sister, and An Angel at My Table (the autobiography of writer Janet Frame, wrongly confined for schizophrenia). Her original screenplay for The Piano has elements of the Gothic in it, of that Victorian sensibility that masks eroticism with fear, mystery and exotic places. It also gives us a heroine who is a genuine piece of work; Ada is not a victim here, but a woman who reads a situation and responds to it. The performances are as original as the characters. Holly Hunter's Ada is pale, grim and hatchetfaced at first, although she is capable of warming. Harvey Keitel's Baines is not what he first seems, but has unexpected reserves of tenderness and imagination. Sam Neill's taciturn husband conceals a universe of fear and sadness behind his clouded eyes. And the performance by Anna Paquin, as Flora the daughter, is one of the most extraordinary examples of a child's acting in movie history. She probably has more lines than anyone else in the film, and is as complex, too - able to invent lies without stopping for a breath, and filled with enough anger of her own that she tattles just to see what will happen.

Stuart Dryburgh's cinematography is not simply suited to the story, but enhances it. Look at his cold grays and browns as he paints the desolate coast, and then the warm interiors that glow when they are finally needed. And if you are oddly affected by a key shot just before the end (I will not reveal it), reflect on his strategy of shooting and printing it, not in real time, but by filming at quarter-time and then printing each frame four times, so that the movement takes on a fated, dreamlike quality.
The Piano is one of those rare movies that is not just about a story, or some characters, but about a whole universe of feeling - of how people can be shut off from each other, lonely and afraid, about how help can come from unexpected sources, and about how you'll never know if you never ask.

This movie won Oscars for Best Actress (Holly Hunter);
Best Supporting Actress (Anna Paquin); and Original Screenplay.

The most memorable aspect of this film however, is Michael Nyman's breathtaking score performed by Holly Hunter herself. It expresses the mood of the film and it is fair to say that the film shapes itself round the music, as is fitting for a film entitled The Piano. A very sensual film too - partly due to the muteness of the central character. Much of the story is visual, and as the book-of-the-film went to show, it can't be well translated into text, just as some books defy translation into film. Much of the beauty of this film comes from the amazing New Zealand countryside twinned with heavy use of a blue filter, and the now-famous soundtrack by Michael Nyman.
Notes from Edinburgh Univ Film Soc. Programme 1994-95 [Read more here]

From a review by Hal Hinson of the Washington Post [Read the full review here]

The Piano, the evocative, powerful, extraordinarily beautiful film from the Australian director Jane Campion, tells the story of a 19th-century Scottish woman who, according to her father's desires, is shipped off to a crude New Zealand settlement to become the wife of a man she's never met. The woman's name is Ada, and, as we learn from her brief narration, she has refused to utter a word since the age of 6, when she simply decided to end her spoken dialogue with the outside world. Yet Ada doesn't think of herself as mute. Softly caressing the keys, she tells us that her piano is her voice. With the exception of her young daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), Ada treasures her piano above everything. Nothing else seems to matter much, not her isolation in this remote, half-civilized outpost, or the drenching rains, or the scary unfamiliarity of the native Maori who live at her doorstep. Sitting rigidly before her instrument, Ada seems to enter into a deep, blissful communion with her music as it flows from her fingertips with the virtuosity of a songbird. More than a mere release or a diversion, the piano is her sustenance, her life.

The Piano is a moody, atmospheric film that, like Campion's other work, conveys as much through suggestion and implication as by direct statement. The performances, too, are exceptionally rich and detailed. Yet on some deeper level they remain mysterious, as if Campion had insisted that the characters remain half-hidden in shadow. This is especially true of Holly Hunter, who without a single line of spoken dialogue manages to give the most moving performance of her career. As Hunter and Campion present her, Ada is a distillation of pure Gothic romanticism. With her chalk-white face and pained eyes, she brings to mind the haunted women in the novels of the Bronte sisters, or the bleak heroine in Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park." She suffers, but the source of her pain is mysterious and undiagnosed.

Judging from Campion's previous films, her primary affliction is femininity itself. In Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990) and now The Piano, her women are haunted creatures at the mercy of their emotions. Their blood runs with sadness, and it is out of this sexual despair that Campion forges her melancholy poetry. The Piano is dark, sublime music, and after it's over, you won't be able to get it out of your head.

Booths Supermarkets

North West Vision

Allerdale Community Fund

Back