The Piano

Jane Campion made history with The Piano becoming the first woman ever to win the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Piano, New Zealand/Australia/France, 1993

Director/screenplay: Jane Campion
Production company: Jan Chapman Productions / CIBY 2000
Producer: Jan Chapman
Executive producer: Alain Depardieu
Associate producer: Mark Turnbull
Director of photography: Stuart Dryburgh
Camera: Alun Bollinger
Editor: Veronika Jenet
Production Designer: Andrew McAlpine
Costume Designer: Janet Patterson
Music composed by: Michael Nyman

With: Holly Hunter (Ada), Harvey Keitel (Baines), Sam Neill (Stewart), Anna Paquin (Flora), Kerry Walker (Aunt Morag), Gordon Hatfield (Te Koori), Genevieve Lemon (Nessie), Tungia Baker (Hira), Ian Mune (Reverend), Lawrence Wharerau (Kamera)

35mm, colour, 122 minutes, M—Contains sex scenes

Awards: co-winner Palme d’Or, Best Actress (Holly Hunter) Cannes Film Festival 1993; Best Original Screenplay (Jane Campion), Best Actress (Holly Hunter), Best Supporting Actress (Anna Paquin), Academy Awards 1994

Jane Campion made history with The Piano becoming the first woman ever to win the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

“Don’t let the mountains of superlatives that have already been heaped on The Piano put you off: Jane Campion’s 19th-century love story lives up to its advance notices. Prepare for something very special. The Piano is much like its remarkable heroine, Ada, a mute (but not deaf) young Scots widow who, with her 9-year-old-daughter, travels to the New Zealand bush to marry a man she has never met. Ada’s husband-to-be calls her ‘stunted.’ The film looks deceptively small, but in character it’s big and strong and complex. Here’s a severely beautiful, mysterious movie that, as if by magic, liberates the romantic imagination.… You know you’re in uncharted cinema territory early on. Ada and Flora, her pretty but gnomelike child, are dumped onto a wild New Zealand beach and then abandoned by the ship that’s brought them halfway around the world. With their crated belongings (including Ada’s beloved piano) spread around them on the sand, the mother and daughter spend the night alone, huddled inside a sort of tent made out of one of Ada’s hoop skirts. This is how they’re found the next morning by Stewart, the well-meaning but dangerously unimaginative man who has ordered Ada by mail; Bains, an illiterate settler with a nose tattooed Maori-style, and the Maori tribesmen hired as bearers. The confusion of emotions of the moment is echoed in the confusion of languages being spoken: English, Maori (translated by English subtitles) and the sign language by which Ada instructs Flora what to say to the others. When Ada and Flora want privacy, they both sign, which is also translated by subtitles. The Piano is full of secrets… More important, The Piano is the story of the heedless and surprising sexual passion that eventually erupts to unite the grossly crude Baines and the seemingly remote and reserved Ada, whose marriage to Stewart hasn’t been a happy one. Things had begun badly when Stewart refused to transport her piano inland to their house. Sometime later, Baines acquires the piano (still sitting on the beach) from Stewart for 80 acres of land. Baines retrieves the piano, then offers to return it to Ada if she will teach him how to play. He asks for one lesson for each key. They haggle, finally agreeing on one lesson for each black key. In this way begins one of the funniest, most strangely erotic love stories in the recent history of film. Ada seems not at all surprised when, at the beginning of the first lesson in Baines’s shack, he admits that he really doesn’t want to learn how to play. Rather, he says, ‘there are things I’d like to do while you play.’ It begins by his having her lift her skirts a few inches as she sits at the piano. He stretches out on the floor, looking up.… Like Sweetie, Ms Campion’s marvelous first feature, The Piano is never predictable, though it is seamless. It’s the work of a major writer and director. The film has the enchanted manner of a fairy tale. Even the setting suggests a fairy tale: the New Zealand bush, with its lush and rain-soaked vegetation, is as strange as the forest in which Flora says her mother was struck dumb…. Not the least of Ms Campion’s achievements is her ability to communicate the heady importance of sexual and romantic feelings to both Ada and Baines. Their love is a simultaneous liberation. The director’s style is spare. No swooping camera movements over naked, writhing bodies. The camera observes the lovers from a distance, from the points of view of the spying child and then of the spying, fascinated and furious Stewart. It’s as if the camera respected the lovers’ privacy but felt compelled to show us what the others see.… The film’s effect is such that it’s almost impossible to consider the contributors separately. The four principal performances are extraordinary: Ms Hunter, with her plain, steely beauty and intelligence; Mr Keitel, so robust and intense in what could be an Oscar performance; Mr Neill, earnest and forever baffled, and the tiny Ms Paquin, who is so sure of herself that she doesn’t seem to be a child of this world. The physical production, smashingly photographed by Stuart Dryburgh, is elegant without fanciness, which is the mark of Ms Campion’s work. She takes the breath away not by conventionally spectacular effects, but by the simple audacity of her choices about where to put the camera and what to show.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times, 16 October 1993

“Compared with Campion’s previous films, The Piano is so deceptively stark and simple that the depth of its vision and achievement takes a while to sink in. In an age where obfuscation and ambiguity have been raised as pinnacles of artistic achievement, where style counts for everything, and content nothing, The Piano sits like a rock in the tide. With its beautifully constructed narrative pitting passion against propriety, individual fulfillment against stifling servitude, this is a story that harks back to the 19th century for its inspiration; a rich, full-blooded Romantic epic. In keeping with that inspiration, the emotions stirred by The Piano are profound, and the meaning never elusive. Perhaps it is in this willingness to engage so directly with an audience that the film’s genius lies. Certainly, the story’s accessibility must account for its universal welcome. But coupled with that also are the toned-down, but still obvious signs of authorship with which Campion has marked her work. Accessibility, in this case, does not denote anonymity. Campion’s signature can be found in the oddness of small co-incidences that fuel the plot, and a point of view that is both interestingly eccentric, and acute. The latter trait is seen in the film’s boldly expressive visual compositions, and in all the small but telling domestic scenes that tear away the clichés of period films to deliver some genuine shocks of insight. Not that The Piano concerns itself overmuch with historical veracity. It is truer to the spirit than the letter of colonial experience, preferring to render generalized facts in a symbolic way, distilled within the relationship between the three main characters. As I said above, the film’s focus is so tight it is deceptive. There is more depth of meaning here than immediately meets the eye. The Piano tends to grow in the memory, rather than recede like most films. Despite its structural debt to a literary tradition formed in another century, The Piano is still very much a contemporary work. Its themes speak directly to the present.” — Costa Botes, The Dominion, 20 September 1993

Screenings: The Piano screened on 5 March 2008 as part of the Big Sky: Empty Land series; it also screened on 13 January 2005 in a season selected by film reviewer and chairman of the Film Archive's Board of Trustees, Mike Nicolaidi.

Writing about his selection Mike wrote "The Piano and Heavenly Creatures are here for several reasons, not least because [together with Once Were Warriors], they were breakthrough hits with film audiences in New Zealand and elsewhere and major prize-winners with film critics and juries at Cannes and Venice. Both films, outside their great technical competences, get to the heart of matters in our land – Jane Campion’s in its uncovering of colonial life and practices and Peter Jackson’s with its unerring focus on ‘dreadful family secrets."