The Piano (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Jan Chapman; directed by Jane Campion; screenplay by Jane Campion; cinematography by Stuart Dryburgh; production design by Andrew McAlpine; edited by Veronika Jenet; starring Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, Anna Paquin, Kerry Walker, and Genevieve Lemon. Blu-ray and UHD, color, 120 min., 1993. A Criterion Collection release.

The Piano packs enough material into its 120 minutes for auteurists, feminists, postcolonialists, postmodernists, musicologists, and almost any other variety of critic to find a foothold. But what’s most striking of all is the sheer sensory appeal of the film, which envelops its melodramatic story in sumptuous colors and textures, expertly supplied by cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, and a score blending Michael Nyman’s artfully repetitive riffs with a mellow romanticism unusual in his work. These elements were in Jane Campion’s directorial plan from the start, as extras in the Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray/UHD edition show. Nyman’s smoothly pulsing music was written while the cameras rolled, and when shooting began in a lushly overgrown area of Campion’s native New Zealand, she wanted the ambient blues and greens to convey a sense of being underwater, indirectly foreshadowing the death by drowning that almost happens at the picture’s climax. The mood of mystery and melancholy reflects the emotional makeup of the most important characters: Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), a woman who has not spoken since she was six years old, and her young daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), who translates her mother’s sign language into speech but doesn’t always follow her eccentric will.

The story takes place around 1850. Ada and Flora have traveled from Scotland for Ada’s arranged marriage to Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill), a colonist trying to forge a Europeanized life on the relatively untamed New Zealand frontier. Alisdair knew his new spouse would be a mute, but he’s taken aback by her other idiosyncrasies, including her fierce attachment to the piano that made the voyage with her; when he refuses to transport the bulky instrument through the jungle to his house, her initial coolness toward him becomes icy. Help comes from George Baines (Harvey Keitel), a former whaler and seafarer who lives nearby and has bonded with the local Maoris, bearing their tattoo marks on his weather-beaten face. Riveted when he hears Ada play, he has the piano brought to his house so he can listen more and perhaps learn the instrument himself. He then offers her a strange bargain: he will turn the piano over to her if she will grant him as many sexual favors as there are black keys on the keyboard. Ada accepts the arrangement, but it’s so demeaning and misogynistic that even the fundamentally decent George soon terminates it and gives the piano back. Real affection now grows between them, and danger looms when an ill-considered move by Flora lets Alisdair know about their evolving romance. A violent climax leads to a near miss with tragedy followed by an unexpectedly upbeat conclusion.

Ada’s piano is a pretty basic one—a flat model with short strings and a tinny sound—but it serves as the film’s chief symbol of the modern civilization that has produced such an intricate and expressive apparatus; as Campion notes in a Criterion extra, pianos use complex mechanics to communicate directly with the emotions. Ada’s ties with her piano are infinitely stronger than her relationship with her husband, and her deepening liaison with George grows out of his respect for the discipline and sensitivity she brings to it.

Other cultural signifiers play key parts in the story as well. The white settlers are carving out their colonial domain amid indigenous Māoris who maintain their own traditions while regarding their new neighbors with a bemused detachment that’s vastly different from the puritanical Christianity of Stewart’s aging Aunt Morag (Kerry Walker) and her friend Nessie (Genevieve Lemon), who cluck with disapproval at Ada’s peculiar ways, which conjure for their constricted minds “the kind of perceived power akin to witchcraft for which women have been violently persecuted for centuries,” as critic Carmen Gray writes in her Criterion leaflet essay. Dark psychological and sociocultural forces also surface in an amateur theatrical staged by some of the locals. Of all the tall tales in the European repertoire, these upstanding citizens have selected “Bluebeard” for their evening’s entertainment, complete with beheaded wives and a severed hand that anticipates the disfigurement Alisdair ultimately inflicts on Ada when he chops off one of her fingers in a fit of jealous rage. The performance of “Bluebeard” can be taken as harmless Grand Guignol showbiz, but the violence it presages is horribly real in both its immediate brutality and its symbolic implications; in a video extra, critic Amy Taubin calls it a stand-in for genital mutilation, and Campion presents it with horrific urgency.

In a thoughtful television documentary that he co-directed in 1995, Neill aptly called New Zealand film a “cinema of unease,” inflected to greater or lesser degrees by ever-present legacies of colonialism and imperialism. This underwent a shift when Campion and others (Lee Tamahori, Peter Jackson) brought new levels of critique to the country’s movie industry; postcolonial perspectives became more prominent, touristic bromides were avoided, Māori culture was portrayed as sophisticated and irreplaceable, and the nation itself became less a “congenial paradise” than a “scenic crime scene,” in Gray’s words, its sins evoked by haunted motifs like the ubiquitous mud of Campion’s mise en scène. Yet, while Campion’s vision in The Piano remains progressive in many ways, shifting political winds haven’t always worked in its favor. When a cruel action happens in the “Bluebeard” theatrical, for instance, the Māori spectators fly into a panic, reacting to the artificial spectacle as if actual mayhem were erupting before their eyes. In a very interesting Criterion interview, the film’s Māori adviser, Waihoroi Shortland, admits that he hesitated before approving this, but decided the panicky behavior might have been plausible for people having an experience wholly new to them. Maybe so, but the scene makes me squirm, as does a later incident when a Māori man finds a piano key detached from the instrument and can’t figure out why it doesn’t make any sound. Such moments turn indigenes into infants.

These problems aside, Shortland’s comments cast useful light on the project. Acknowledging that the Māoris are the “backdrop” of a narrative focused mainly on white characters, he says it was his job to “weave them into the texture” of the film, showing them “at ease in their own world,” where they were still the majority culture. “They may have felt they had discovered us,” Shortland says of the English, but the Māoris decided to “look at this new invasion…and see what we can get out of it. Things changed later…but at the time they were very much in charge.” Although that seems true and reasonable, I wish the personal dramas of The Piano left more room for their historical contexts. By contrast, the film’s feminist outlook is admirably uncompromising, inspired in part by Campion’s love of Emily Dickinson and especially Emily Brontë, whose 1847 novel Wuthering Heights is an obvious point of reference. Ada and Flora are flawed individuals, but they successfully constitute the “conspiracy of femininity” that Campion had in mind.

The film’s aesthetics are of a piece with its narrative. When she planned the overarching visual style, Campion was not entirely exaggerating when she told Dryburgh that its mute heroine and largely inarticulate males would make it almost a silent movie, with images regularly prevailing over dialogue. To achieve the film’s uncanny ambiance, Dryburgh studied the long-gone autochrome process, a pioneering method of color photography devised by Auguste and Louis Lumière around 1903; generating a positive image on a glass plate with no intervening negative, it caused colors to shift in unpredictable ways that Campion and Dryburgh drew on for the movie’s subtly unstable look. To create the physical environment, production designer Andrew McAlpine installed burned-out trees equipped with hoses that could spew simulated rainstorms and muck up the ground through which the characters slog.

Nothing heightens the film’s impact more than Nyman’s score, and his video interview is a highlight of the Criterion disc. Before the runaway success of The Piano, he was best known for his contributions to audacious Peter Greenaway pictures such as A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), so he was understandably surprised when Campion started the hiring process by telling him she didn’t want “the Greenaway crap” for her movie. This could have ended their collaboration in its first minutes—after all, “the Greenaway crap” is also “the Nyman crap,” as the composer points out—but he realized that whereas his Greenaway scores are deliberately schematic, referring to objects and abstractions more than feelings and emotions, The Piano could proceed differently. Since the piano is Ada’s voice, he reasoned, Ada is herself a kind of composer, and compositional problems could be solved by imagining what she would say at a given moment if she used words. He also did extensive research into the sort of Scottish music she might have heard while growing up, settling on a group of hymn-like tunes that he rewrote in his own minimalist style. The result isn’t one of Nyman’s most exciting scores—to my ears, the Greenaway crap still reigns supreme—but it has developed a life far beyond the soundtrack where it originated.

Most of the performances in The Piano have a genuine and authentic ring, and two of them are flat-out extraordinary. Paquin borders on miraculous, investing Flora with an energy, intelligence, and passion that are simply astonishing for an eleven-year-old child in her first real movie role. Hunter already had a decade of experience, and it’s fascinating to learn that Campion was reluctant to meet with her at first, feeling she was too physically small for the character. Her other assets far outweighed this, however; first and foremost, she had played the piano since age nine, and did all her own playing in the film, including the difficult task of replacing the table piano’s thin sounds with the richer tones of a modern instrument in postproduction. Since national sign languages were rudimentary in the nineteenth century, moreover, Hunter developed one that felt right for her. Hunter’s hands are arguably the movie’s most eloquent stars.

After premiering at Cannes, where it shared the Palme d’Or with Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine and brought Hunter the Best Actress Award, The Piano earned eight Academy Award nominations, three of which became wins: Best Original Screenplay for Campion, Best Actress for Hunter, and Best Supporting Actress for Paquin, making her the second-youngest Oscar winner ever; and in 2019 an international BBC survey named it the best of all pictures directed by women. Campion’s career has followed a fluctuating path since The Piano, with intermittent dry spells and occasional triumphs like The Portrait of a Lady (1996), the miniseries Top of the Lake (2013), and, most recently, The Power of the Dog, another multiple Oscar nominee, which won Campion the Academy Award this year as Best Director. The Piano stands with her strongest work, and the new Criterion edition provides a top-quality showcase for its audiovisual glories.

David Sterritt is editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author or editor of fifteen film-related books.

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