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filmista · 6 years

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The Piano (1993)

“What a death! What a chance! What a surprise! My will has chosen life! Still it has had me spooked and many others besides!”

Jane Campion’s The Piano is well known for being the first and until recently one of the only films that has won a woman a Palme D’or for best director at Cannes. It’s still one of New Zealand’s best known pictures and a steady reference, when discussing female directors.

The only thing I knew about it however was, how successful it was at Cannes and that it was at the time (and perhaps still) regarded as a very controversial film, of which it has been heavily debated whether it is or isn’t a feminist picture in nature. It’s kind of sad that in large part today it lives on through its reputation of “difficult”, because it’s truly a stunning film.

When I first watched it (I have seen it twice since) I was swept away and fell in love instantly, it quickly got a spot amidst my favorite period dramas. It felt thoroughly modern and at the same time timeless to me.

I love it when a film and its maker alike, are brave and it isn’t afraid to sometimes shock or provoke a little. And not out a need to just shock necessarily, but more about a passion to let their vision go uncompromised.

The piano certainly is that kind of film. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that not everyone liked this and that some people might have felt shocked or even appaled.

I think this is in part due to the fact that it doesn’t offer us any clearly defined or initially even likeable human beings in it. They’re all far from perfect, but that makes the film all the more grittier and emotionally rawer, which might be why it has endured in time.

What made it for me so special and masterful, and what fuelled a desire to watch it again almost immediately after, is the fact that the film is so clashingly different from what you usually expect of a film of the same kind.

It’s at times a living contradiction, it embraces conventions, and then dances around them. It might be a period drama, but its the first period drama in a while; that had me in genuine suspense, shocked and surprised pleasantly at every turn while its story was unfolding.

I had a vague idea that this was a period drama, and read that it involved two men, I just thought it might be extremely pretty to look at melodrama. I like period dramas, but only when they manage to do something unexpected.

Something that surprises me and The Piano certainly succeeded at that. Visually it does justice to the time period it’s supposed to take place in, the clothes and artifacts and attitudes of the people match and are what is supposed to be expected, initially...

Yet as I said, at its heart it clashes with these traditions and expectations of the genre and subverts them. And that’s what’s so exhilarating about it for me, it’s a powerful film, in that it gently imposes its feeling and emotions onto you.

If it reminds me of any other film, it’s only in one thing of Picnic At Hanging Rock

in that it takes “proper victorian society, and puts everything upside down. Letting it run wild, letting it be led completely by instinct, and at the same time show the perversion of its repression and properness.

The Piano is an incredibly beaufiul film in terms of visuals. Like many or at least good period dramas it painstakingly recreates the period its supposed to take place in. However it is as I said also visually a gem.

The cinematography is sumptuous and lush, alternatingly light and dark according to the mood of a scene and often of a character. The colors of the landscape heightened, to put emphasis on both the beauty and wild unpredictableness of it.

It’s been criticsed a few times for its editing being too abrupt or grainy in quality. But personally I love it, the cinematography and the sound, don’t follow any sets of rule any more rules than its story.

Again what surprised me about it, is that for a period drama it was surprisingly untame and erotic, yet at times brutal while still elegant, like only a female touch seems able to bring to a film sometimes.

The Piano opens with Scottish mail order bride Ada (a magnificent Holly Hunter) being sent to New Zealand by her father alongside of her young and preccocious daughter Flora (Anna Paquin in one of the best child performances I’ve seen), to marry Stewart a local farmer and settler.

As soon as we see this, we know what kind of world to expect, and how the society in it functions. Women were still regarded as little better than cattle, to be sold off and bought, with the other only purpose of bearing children.

You best weren’t too temperamnental or strong willed. All things the film’s protagonist is not. We discover another curiosity about her: she hasn’t spoken since she was 6 years old. We don’t know why this is; it’s ever since her last husband was struck by lightning when they were singing in a forest during a thunderstorm once, according to her daughter.

During another moment she tells someone that it’s because her mother says that people talk rubbish anyway, and that it isn’t neccessary to listen. It’s probably a bit of a combination of different things, she very likely has been emotionally traumatized at one point in her life. We don’t know whether something happened as a child, or with the man that gave her, her daughter and who he was.

Very likely her muteness is equal parts brought on by trauma, as selective. It gives her a tranquility, she doesn’t have to answer, if somehting displeases her. Yet all the while in her mind she can think whatever she wants, and no one will read her. It’s also a trait that would make it perfectly socially acceptable to be a bit withdrawn sometimes.

With her daughter she communicates through sign language, and her daughter translates them for her whenever the need arises.. Their dynamic with each other works, until of course going to New Zealand.

Things start off bleak immediately, her husband isn’t there on time to meet her and her daughter. So the two are forced to sleep in an improvised tent, made out of her underskirt, and sleep outside on the beach.

The next day he arrives, but rather than apologize,instantly complains to someone about how small she is. Prior we see he had written her a card sayng he didn’t mind her being mute, as god loves even dumb creatures.

Through the tone of the voiceover we can instantly tell how she feels about him, not positvely at all. Ada has one thing in her life that allows her to feel like she can speak and feel alive, her piano.

However her new husband, even though she empathically, desperately makes lcear how important it is to her, he could care less, and tells her it is too heavy, the piano is now exposed to the elements on the beach.

No affection, love or lust grows between her and her husband. And initially her daughter refuses to call him papa. Stewart grows frustraed, especially since she also doesn’t talk, she looks at him with an icy expression at all times.

He doesn’t seem to understand that this is because he never tries to see her fully, try to understand her and show kind of tenderness that’s unforced and from within him.

Ada is eventually so melancholy by the separation from that she sneaks off to the beach to play it. There a neighbour hears it and is so moved by Ada’s playing that he offers her husband a deak, land in exchange for letting his wife come over to teach him how to play piano.

We quickly find out his plan is not enitely act out of love of music, but also a strong sexual attraction to Ada, he isntinctually gets that her piano is a way to come closer to her.

And here is where the film takes its often controversial trun, into nasty romance territory. The film becomes about sexual power play, and how the power can shift from one person to another. Though here that grows into genuine affection on both sides.

Banes makes Ada a rather crude offer, small sexual favors, in turn she gets to play her piano. There’s 88 keys, acts like taking off her jacket might equal one, while raising her skirt would be five. Each act is assigned a number of keys.

Initially she seems bothered by the offer, but accepts in order to play. Had a man directed the film, we might have been shown this in a much more impersonal and aggressive way, there’s never anything grauitious about it.

But we really get to see the perspectuve off both. Both people are lonley and long for a real human connection. Ada knows this of Baes, and quickly realizes her power: he desires her company, and is affected when she pretens to not care.

Meanwhile she has the power to negotiate the sexual acts in the direction that she lies, increasing the number of keys required for a certain action.

While this offer is undeniably crude and borders on prostutituon. Campion did take a surprsingly affecting trun. Both people find warmth in each other. And by the time they make love, they are eactually in love.

And surprsingly for a that takes place in the time it does, he checks in with Ada, sees if she’s okay with it. And unselfishly proceeds to focusing on her pleasure, something she likley hadn’t experienced.

There’s even a scene in which he lifts her hoopskirt to perform oral sex (wild!) there’s a genuine affection and passion; and it is with him that she finally speaks, whispering something in his ear during the act, he seems overjoyed by her reaction.

And while it’s a powerful moment, it’s one of a great many in the film. It shows them connecting a personal level. However Ada’s husband, saw the two of them, only discoering the betrayal because her daughter Ada had told her stepdad, who she has finally come to like.

After sleeping with each other, Banes tells her they should not see each other again, as he was already suspicious and mean towards her. Thus sacrificing what he feels for her.

Howver after the incident events take a turn for the worse. And George snaps completely, actually locking her in the house, by setting wooden boards around points of exit. His stepdaughter voluntarily helps him. Campion never explicitly places blame on the child though.

She was likely, dangerously acting out childhish jelaous, as she is ni longer her mother’s only source of happiness and thing she pays constant attention to. But she is eventually horrified, when Stewart in his mad jealousy goes even further.

Ada whilst not in love with her husband, knows exactly what he wants. And starts to play right into it, finally approaching him physically, so that he thinks she’s warming up to him or even falling in love. Finally he trusts her and allows her to go outside, however she can’t really do much because her daugher is still there.

So she decides to write Banes a declararion of love. Asking her daughter to deliver it to him. However she brings it to her stepad, who opens and reads it. And finally fully loses it.

Previously he had already tried to rape her (after catching her in the act), but he now drags her outside towards a choping block cuts off one of her fingers, that he sends to Banes with the threat “come near her again, and I’ll cut off the others”. There’s a moment in the film, in which certain characters attend a play of the Blue Beard story, perhaps this foreshadowed his violence in the end.

There’s a look that Ada gives her husband after it happens, it’s one of pure disgust and hatred. The way a person would look at their shoe after having stepped in dog poop.

Something interesting happened at this moment, the veneer of “respectiful Victorian society cracks. Stewart turns out to be more insensitve and ulimately a bigger brute than the man who had “gone native”.

The difference is that Banes has long ceased to give a shit about the ways of societt, and what anyone thinks. And that he is therefore free to see and treat Ada as a fully layered and equal human being.

By which she reveals sides, she hadn’t shown anyone and thus feels appreciated and falls for him. And he falls for her in spite of her, what would at the time have been deemed an unseemingly strong will for a woman. I’s very likely why he fell for her to begin with.

Yet Stewart, regarded her almost as somehthing inhuman, and sees her as somehthing he’s entitled to as a man, and expects that she will automatically submit to his authority.

Ada however doesn’t. Like Banes, she seems to care very little for societal norms as well. If Stewart had been kinder to her maybe the relationship would have evolved different, but since his actions at the beginning of the film, he condemmned himself by his unwillingmess to “listen”.

Finally stewart realizes tat Ada will never love him, and allows her to doo what she had wnated: run off with Banes, we don’t know if it’s entirely selffles, if he in the end realizes his mistakes and wants her happiness, or if he has given up.

Regardless it sets about a change and Ada is now with Banes, who has fashioned her a metal finger. When they go away with each other, he takes her piano, knowing how important it is. She however no longer wants it and demands it to be thrown in the water. Where she ends up with it.

The piano at least I think so, represents her past, her bad memories and a means of communication. Or rather that with which she escaped having her “voice” oppresed as a woman. Briefly she seems to contemplate dying with it, but then fights to the surface and joins Banes, to embark on a new life.

The figure of her lover, is a controversial one. Some reduce him to a rapist, since they say that Ada had no choice or agency. But that would mean denying things, first that Ada isn’t as demure and innocent looking as she seems.

She read the situation, and played into all the while realizing, her power, it’’s ultimately she that sets the pace and decides what happens when. But more importantly, this interpreatation dismisses Ada as sexual; it denies the possibiluty that she could have desires and enjoy pleasures, or have a kinky side that enjoyed the seductive game they played initially.

There’s a moment where the tone shifts completely, Banes gently makes a hole in her stockings, and caresses the skin underneath it. We see Ada’s face, she responds with a visible gasp of enjoyment, that makes it clear she’s excited by what’s happening and wants it.

That’s another thing that’s great in the film, it subtly and accurately shows feamle desire and pleasure. The Piano could be at times considered quite steamy, but not because you see all that much but rather how what you see is shown.

Focused on the emotions , and often the joy of the moment. That moment in which Banes lifts Ada’s skirt to pleasure her is signifcant, there’s urgency and laughs, at just how difficult it is to lift.

It recognises that sometimes sex isn’t always perfectly in sync and sometimes just funny, but more importantly here fun. One of my problems, with the sex scenes in some films, is that there’s always taken so terribly seriously...

And it’s quite surprising that given the film’s age, that scene still feels so incredible refreshing. It is just like Holly Hunter’s performance, that makes the film, literally quitely brilliant.

Hunter learned to play the piano herself, so whenever she plays it (sometimes only as backgorund music) it sounds genuinely beautiful and moving, and like someone with actual passion for music is playing.

For an actress playing someone mute, must be hard but Hunter handles it beutifully, never laying it on to thick. But rather knows how to sublty convye emotion through her face and body at each moment, we can read from her face what she is feeling or how she is interpreting a certain situation, it’s fascinating to watch.

The character of Ada is not simple one. She seems like a quiet, calm and reserved woman and seems to enjoy a certain isolation. Or rather is revealed to perhaps enjoy the company of those she likes, and doesn’t have to pretend to.

As soon as someone does something she doesn’t like, she clearly lets this be known, indicating a fierce pride. And Hunter shows that beautifully, just with one look Ada can seem to shimmer with rage and indignation. The Piano is ultimately a fascinating look at gender and societal norms, and a beautiful ode to the priceless freedom of loving passionately and who we chose.

“Ada, I'm unhappy. 'Cause I want you. 'Cause my mind has seized on you and can think of nothing else. This is why I've suffered. I am sick with longing. I don't eat, I don't sleep.”

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