THE PIANO
A film review by Gareth Rees
Copyright 1993 Gareth Rees
Time: sometime in the nineteenth century. Holly Hunter plays Ada, a beautiful and talented pianist. She has a mighty will and, it seems, has refused to speak since childhood. Probably on account of her having an illegitimate daughter (Flora, played by Anna Paquin) she is still unmarried, until her father finds Stewart (Sam Neill), a landowner in New Zealand, who is willing to marry her (English women being scarce in that colony).
The film opens with Ada's "inner voice" (we don't hear her speak out loud during the film) narrating the above and then we cut to a lonely New Zealand shore with men struggling through the surf to unload Ada, her possessions, and her beloved piano (Ada's only means of expressing herself). Stewart comes to collect her, but does not realise how important the piano is to Ada, and she is unable to tell him. It is left, half-uncrated, on the beach.
Ada has trouble coping with the damp and the mud of the settlement where Stewart lives. She demands her piano and sulks when she is told that she is not in Scotland anymore and that there are more important things than music.
Another landowner, Baines (Harvey Keitel) sees Ada and is smitten by her. Knowning how important the piano is to her, he fetches it from the beach and offers it to her in return (at first) for letting him watch her play, and (later) for sexual favours. Improbably, she falls in love with him, and inevitable tragedy follows.
Director Jane Campion has said of the film (I'm quoting from memory): "These people don't have twentieth century sensibilities about sex; they aren't prepared for its raw power". Certainly the behaviour of the characters is strange from a modern perspective--Baines' lust for Ada is easy to understand, but why Ada's for him? I think the film may be rooted in Nineteenth Century Romantic sensibilities more than Campion would care to admit--Ada and Baines are supposed, I think, to be fey and wayward people (Ada talks about being ruled by a powerful Will and her music is completely alien to the characters in the film other than Baines; Baines seems to have attempted to go native; certainly he wears Maori tattooing) thrown together by an exotic and dreamlike setting.
In the light of this, the ending in which they find comfortable domesticity is completely unconvincing--the briefly considered tragic alternative ending in which she kills herself is the much more emotionally convincing of the two. I guess it isn't what audiences want to see these days.
The best part of the film, for me, was the music--Michael Nyman's hypnotic, romantic, slightly naive piano melodies have to carry much of the responsibility for conveying Ada's character, but I think he succeeds magnificently.
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