Personal Canon ~ #09
The Piano
The Piano (1993)
Written and Directed by Jane Campion
Starring: Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, Anna Paquin, Kerry Walker and Cliff Curtis
Production & Distributor CiBy 2000 and Miramax Released 11/12/93
I saw The Piano in Salt Lake City at the Broadway theater in November 1993 and I’ve never forgotten the experience. The movie held me in rapt attention from its first stirring images and Holly Hunter's high pitched but quiet delivery of one of the greatest opening monologues I'd ever heard
The voice you're hearing is not my speaking voice but my mind's voice...I remember my best girlfriend’s hand gripping my arm during the most brutal sequence late in the movie. She was so upset she nearly bolted from her seat. I vividly remember exiting the theater after the credits rolled, both of us in a daze. We knew we’d seen something great but what exactly had we seen? Watching The Piano for the first time can feel like confronting a gorgeous but alien presence. It’s utterly transporting but also unfamiliar. Your rational mind will tell you that this shouldn’t be the case. But deeply sensual films are uncommon. What’s more, films shot through with feminine mystique, energies and point of view are arguably the rarest forms of cinema. The Piano stood womanly and defiant and far removed from other films that came before it and, sadly, has remained a foreign thing. It's still a rarity.
Jane Campion’s masterpiece, with its eerily beautiful New Zealand landscapes (before Lord of the Rings popularized the place for Hollywood) and bold femininity, felt otherworldly in 1993 but like all truly great art, it proved unusually accessible despite the challenging gauntlet it threw down. It was a major arthouse and critical success, loved by both the intelligentsia and the more middlebrow Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Before it closed its run it had won eight Oscar nominations, three statues, a sizeable box office gross for the time and a passionate enduring following.
The film begins with a curiously fuzzy image. The next cut reveals it as a POV shot: we’re looking through the fingers of Ada McGraw (Holly Hunter) who is partially covering her eyes... from what we’re not sure. The camera doesn't stay subservient to Ada's point of view but rather begins to study her, this curious mute creature. Hunter's fascinating performance, incongruously both stony and expressive, would have demanded it even if the director (Jane Campion) wasn't so wise and the cinematography (by Stuart Dryburgh) so richly rewarding. We learn that Ada has been offered in marriage to a man in New Zealand. Ada seems curiously amused at her fateMy husband says my muteness does not bother him. He writes, and hark this: God loves dumb creatures so why not he?Ada speaks of silence and of her beloved piano and almost instantly we're off. The voyage is over in one superbly judged edit (a fish eye view of the boat, sailing in and out of frame) as is typical of the film's economical mood-driven storytelling. Ada's new life begins...
Her daughter vomits (it's a feminine film but never dainty), her beloved piano is abandoned by her nervous new husband (Sam Neill), and Ada is trying to find her footing on the shores of New Zealand as dozens of hands reach for her. Campion makes superb use of hand imagery throughout the film. Hearing gets the most thematic and obvious presence in the film, but of the five senses, sight and touch (rarely verbalized) are equally as essential to the film's concerns and its unerring aesthetics.
That shot of the hands grabbing at Ada also serve as a succinct pre-show to what will come. (Campion is fond of foreshadowing and also introduces the angel wings and axes long before their arrival in the film's one truly violent moment). Before long her husband has traded the piano for land owned by George Baines (Harvey Keitel) and Ada is torn between the two men. They both want to possess her sexually. Ada, desperate for her voice (i.e. the piano), begins to trade sexual favors with Baines to earn the piano back. Her husband remains clueless for a time.
Jane Campion, never one to let one single mood own any scene, keeps the audience off balance with questions. Does Ada love George? Is Mr. Stewart willfully obtuse to her needs or merely unskilled and ignorant when it comes to reciprocal love? Does Ada understand her own sexuality or is she herself, in some lesser measure, at sea as well? And what of her daughter Flora's (Anna Paquin in a delightful Oscar winning debut) temper, curiosity and shifting allegiances? The romantically triangular story is fairly straightforward but the intricacies of its telling, the clearly drawn insightful characterizations and the sometimes double-mooded scenes are the mark of a master.
Consider the almost casual cruelty with which the husband denies his wife her piano despite every sign that it is essential to her happiness. Ada makes do, carving mock keys into her kitchen table. Campion doesn't just turn up the drama of the husband's ignorance but she lets in the comedy of his ignorance, too, with help from his busy body sounding board Aunt Morag (Kerry Walker)
Mr. Stewart: What would you think if someone were to play a kitchen table like it were a piano.
Aunt Morag: Like it were a piano?
Mr. Stewart: It’s strange isn’t it? It’s not a piano. It doesn’t make any sound.
Aunt Morag: No, no sound.
Mr. Stewart: I knew she was mute but now I’m thinking perhaps it’s more than that. I wonder if she’s not brain affected.
Aunt Morag: No sound at all?
Mr. Stewart: It’s a table.
The Piano, which gets darker and darker as it progresses to a truly harrowing climax with an ax, surprises even its own heroine with its optimistic finale. Ada is allowed happiness, sexual fulfillment and a voice in her own life.Perhaps as a result the film is often incorrectly reduced to a feminist fable, a film that's all about women having no voice or finding one, but the scope of Jane Campion’s achievement is broader. If anything The Piano is a masterwork of humanism. Take George Baines, for instance. Only a wilfully ignorant viewer, eager to reduce the movie to a one sided thesis would not see his own redemption within the tale or how his love for Ada sexually liberates both of them from previous degradations. Take the pitiable tale of Mr. Stewart. A lesser film would serve him a violent comeuppance as audience pleasing wrap-up but The Piano is smarter and more humane. In letting Ada go, the husband arguably has his own miniature redemption, though he's left with his loneliness and sexual repression (his one chance to enjoy Ada sexually he self-sabotages, he's not enlightened enough to include her desire, and her sexuality into his view of marriage).
In my first encounters with The Piano I was fascinated by the blocking of certain scenes, Campion's amusing doubling: two characters mirroring each other within the frame. It's most obvious with Ada and Flora, but the other mother and daughter Aunt Morag and Nessie (Genevieve Lemon) are choreographed in much the same way. And even Mr. Stewart is given a mirror in one scene. One of the Maori workers moves in synchronization with his employer as they both curiously regard Ada as she arrives on the beach. It's unclear whether the Maori man is mocking his employer by imitating him or merely sharing his intrigue. But now, years later I find myself more moved by the asymmetries, revealing the way in which the movie prizes the humanism and individuality of the characters... even when they come together.
This is my new favorite shot in the film:
Early in the picture, before the sexual bartering begins, George Baines takes the pleading mother and daughter to the beach so that Ada can play on her abandoned piano. It's our first inkling that Baines has a good heart and that he might contribute to Ada's happiness. There are three individual characters with corresponding telling tracks. Ada, in typical single-minded fashion, makes a straight line from the piano, Flora --always imaginatively playful-- has made fanciful designs on the beach, and George has quietly watched in silence, his agenda always hidden from view. Daughter runs to join her mother and George dovetails in, all tracks eventually merging. The shot is over in a moment but it describes them all in individual and exquisite detail. The whole film is filled with ravishing touches like this.
But for all its visual and thematic beauty, it isn't an easy film. The characters are tough, the truths are painful and despite this coming together, Campion and her actors refuse easy characterizations. To some extent all of The Piano's main players remain unknowable. This makes Aunt Morag uncomfortable. In another comic sequence, she attempts to put her finger on this odd creature who has disrupted their lives.
You know I’m thinking of the piano. She does not play the piano as we do, Nessie. No, she is a strange creature and her playing is strange, like a mood that passes into you. Now your playing is plain and true and that is what I like. To have a sound creep inside you is not at all pleasant.
A recurring gesture of Ada's is the brushing of the back of her hand against the surface of the things that she passionately loves: piano, daughter, Baines... even in one sad sequence, her husband's nude body. When she does you feel more than just their surfaces. You feel Ada's love and longing. You feel the hand that created one of the greatest film heroines of all time, Jane Campion's hand. The Piano, then, is more than a film. Watching this masterpiece is a deeply sensual, almost physical experience. Its intimate expansiveness puts other films to shame. Aunt Morag was right: The Piano is like a mood that passes into you. Aunt Morag was wrong or at least inarticulate: this unique film might not be pleasant in her "plain and true" sense but its melodies are genuinely beautiful. The Piano's evocative imagery and the powerful voice of its screenplay and score linger for years, revealing fresh intricacies each time you see and hear them. It's a feast for the senses and the finest film of the nineties. One wishes one could brush one's hand slowly across all of it's disparate surfaces: piano, flesh, angel wings, water, mud. They're deeply loved.
discuss on blog / index of the Personal Canon: 100 Movies
