The Piano (1993)

“It is one of those rare movies that is not just about a story, or some characters, but about a whole universe of feeling…The Piano is as peculiar and haunting as any film I’ve seen.” — Roger Ebert

“From a distance, The Piano seems too preposterous for words; but then, as Ada knows all too well, words merely get in the way…the story worms further into the guts of Victorian experience than most historical dramas, because it aims at the most neglected aspect of that age, and the most alarmingly modern: its surrealism.” — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

SYNOPSIS

A Palme d’Or-winning breakthrough for its director and a bona fide cause célèbre upon release, Jane Campion’s The Piano fuses her penchants for lush romanticism and tactile texture in an intensely symbolic Gothic drama that became that rarest of rarities: a full-blooded art film that nevertheless crossed over into the mainstream. Holly Hunter stars as Ada, a mute Scottish woman who arrives in nineteenth-century New Zealand with her young daughter (Anna Paquin) and beloved piano to enter an arranged marriage with a rigid landowner (Sam Neill). When her husband refuses to transport the instrument from the beach, Ada enters into a charged bargain with his neighbor Baines (Harvey Keitel), initiating a relationship in which desire, possession, and power become increasingly entangled. Campion renders the landscape as both sensuous and forbidding, while Hunter’s extraordinary physical performance makes Ada’s silence the center of an elaborate network of communication in which gesture becomes language, music becomes speech, and music itself becomes an expression of erotic desire. With an audacious visual style that finds startling expressive possibilities in camera placement, rhythm, and performance, The Piano ultimately becomes as much a film about the possibilities and limitations of cinematic language as it is a commanding, passionate study of a woman struggling to make herself understood.