Jane Campion (1993)
Jane Campion’s The Piano wears its art on its sleeve. I saw this celebrated film, set in a New Zealand coastal frontier town in the mid-nineteenth century, on its original release and remember being impressed. Ahead of seeing it a second time this month, on its twenty-fifth anniversary re-release, I could bring to mind barely a single image, let alone a single human interaction, in it: watching The Piano again, I began to understand why. This is an exceptionally accomplished piece of film-making, full of imaginative visual compositions in both outdoor and indoor sequences. The New Zealand geography – sea, trees, vegetation, mud – is wonderfully photographed and lit by Stuart Dryburgh. The physical attitudes of the heroine Ada (Holly Hunter) seated at the piano, the movement of the Victorian clothes, the contrasting tones and textures of the bodies of Ada and her lover George Baines (Harvey Keitel) during sex – all these are finely realised. Yet Campion’s vision is so thoroughly preconceived that it prevents you from seeing anything more than she means you to see. She limits your engagement with the film.
The most dynamic of several scenes in which Ada’s ineffectual husband Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill) tries and fails to assert what he considers his conjugal rights takes place in woodland: as Ada struggles to escape, Stewart grasps at her dress, thereby exposing the metal structure beneath her hoop skirt. These struts and the tangle of branches on the woodland floor impeding her progress combine to illustrate the severe constraints on Ada’s womanly freedom. Message received and understood. Later on, the nearly crazed Stewart takes an axe to the index finger of his wife’s right hand, a punishment for her breaking a promise to end contact with Baines. The maimed Ada stumbles outside and almost faints: she seems to be clinging on to consciousness in order to achieve a visually remarkable shape as her body eventually collapses onto boggy ground. There are many moments like this in The Piano, thought-provoking only to the extent that you think, ‘Wow: that took a lot of technique’.
A Scot, apparently in her early thirties, Ada is sold by her father into marriage with Stewart, a frontiersman. She makes the long sea voyage to New Zealand with her young daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) and their possessions, most notably Ada’s relentlessly symbolic piano – her chief means of self-expression. Ada has been mute since the age of six, although no one, including her, knows why. She believed she could communicate without words with the man who fathered Flora; he ‘became frightened and stopped listening’, and disappeared. Ada uses sign language and has taught it to her daughter, who acts as her interpreter. The woman lacking a voice is a potent metaphor even if, in this case, it creates a distance between Ada and other women, as well as between her and men. Jane Campion, who also wrote the screenplay of The Piano, treats the idea as seriously as Guillermo del Toro does shallowly in The Shape of Water. She interweaves her feminist and colonial vs indigenous culture-clash themes resourcefully in a Christmas pageant sequence, where Maori audience members, uncomprehending and angered by what they’re seeing on the stage, interrupt a production of ‘Bluebeard’.
For anyone who, like me, had enjoyed listening to as well as watching her in Raising Arizona and Broadcast News (both 1987), a silent Holly Hunter seemed to mean an inevitable deprivation. There are positive and negative reasons why it turned out not to be so. Hunter gives a display of formidable technical control. In the brief voiceovers (Ada explains this is her ‘mind’s voice’) at the beginning and end of the film, her Scottish accent sounds a bit silly. The ten-year-old Anna Paquin is increasingly powerful as Flora. Both main men are excellent too, in spite of the film’s starkly contrasting attitude towards them. George Baines, an ex-sailor turned forester, is exempt from chauvinist and colonialist criticism: he’s what Ada desires and has adopted Maori customs, including tattooing his face. Harvey Keitel, as emotionally needy as he’s physically imposing in the role, gives one of his most nuanced performances. Alisdair Stewart is a desperately earnest figure of fun yet Sam Neill makes him sympathetically vulnerable, at least until Stewart and his axe do the indefensible. The film won, among many other prizes, three Academy Awards – for Best Actress, Supporting Actress and Original Screenplay. Why Michael Nyman’s (now famous) score wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar is a mystery. If it wasn’t for Nyman’s beautiful music, The Piano might put you off the piano for life. The film is still widely regarded as Jane Campion’s masterpiece. I prefer The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and, especially, Bright Star (2009).
15 June 2018
