Jane Campion’s absorbing, unsettling romance gives Holly Hunter a woman whose silence never diminishes her force. Michael Nyman’s music sometimes presses harder than the performances need, but the film’s attention to Ada’s desires makes its intensity worthwhile.
Jane Campion’s The Piano is an absorbing romance, and an uncomfortable one. We recommend it, with a reservation about music that sometimes insists on what the actors have already conveyed. Set in nineteenth-century New Zealand, it takes Ada McGrath’s wishes seriously in a society that grants women little freedom to act on them. Holly Hunter gives Ada enough force to keep the film from settling into the familiar business of admiring a woman’s suffering.
Hunter’s achievement begins with the fact that Ada does not speak, yet never seems beyond our understanding. We can sense the effort of making herself understood, and the anger at having to make that effort, without the performance becoming laborious. We were moved by the anger Hunter puts into Ada’s silence. Campion’s writing allows her to be difficult, and Hunter makes that difficulty understandable without asking us to approve of everything about her.
Anna Paquin gives Flora McGrath a force of her own, holding our attention even against Hunter’s concentrated intensity. Harvey Keitel’s George Baines and Sam Neill’s Alisdair Stewart belong to the same struggle over who gets to want what, and who gets to decide. Neither man is as compelling as Ada, though that imbalance feels earned by Hunter’s performance. Campion lets these competing desires remain awkward, and resists the temptation to make passion an automatic excuse for people’s behaviour.
Stuart Dryburgh’s photography gives the New Zealand landscape a sensuality that makes the repression among its inhabitants seem more severe. The scenery is beautiful, but looking at it is rarely restful; the scale of the surroundings makes the restrictions on Ada’s life feel particularly oppressive. Andrew McAlpine’s production design gives those restrictions a convincing period setting, while Janet Patterson’s costumes reinforce the formality of the society around her. Both work because the people wearing the clothes and inhabiting these surroundings remain so troublesome and alive.
Veronika Jenet’s editing is especially valuable because this is a story that could easily become a succession of charged pauses. The narrative stays readable without making every feeling immediately clear, and its unpredictability does not seem like a trick played on the audience. Michael Nyman’s score gives Ada’s unspoken feelings an urgency that helps sustain the film’s emotional pressure. We understand why the music attracts such praise, though there are passages when its insistence narrows our freedom to respond.
That is our chief reservation: the score sometimes makes an already intense film feel overemphatic. Hunter needs less help than she is given, and we occasionally wanted more space to consider her without being prompted. Yet Campion avoids a familiar weakness of period romances, in which suffering becomes sufficient evidence that a woman has loved properly. Ada’s wishes matter in themselves, and the film remains interested in her even when she cannot be made into an agreeable heroine.
The Piano asks for attention to people who are not going to explain themselves neatly. Its severity need not put anyone off: Hunter and Paquin give it enough life to make the effort worthwhile. Choose it for an evening when being unsettled would be welcome.
