SOURCE: A review of The Piano, in Film Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3, Spring, 1994, pp. 46-50.

[Greenberg is an American educator, psychiatrist, nonfiction writer, and author of Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch (1993). In the following review, he discusses the themes of The Piano, focusing on sexuality and identity.]

Jane Campion's Sweetie (1989) described the calamitous impact of a raucous schizophrenic woman upon her relatives. An Angel at My Table (1990), based on the autobiography of Janet Frame, depicted the no less harrowing effects of institutionalization upon a female writer misdiagnosed as chronically schizophrenic. The Piano, directed from her own screenplay, comprises Campion's most extraordinary exploration of unsettled, unsettling feminine outsiders to date. Its heroine is Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), a Victorian unwed mother of pallid countenance and somber dress, whose silent compliance conceals and protects a fiercely unconventional spirit.

Ada is not so much unable as unwilling to speak. She suffers, or, depending upon one's viewpoint, practices elective mutism. This rare, puzzling condition usually develops in early childhood and occurs rather more frequently in girls than boys. The electively mute child has been characterized as symbiotically bound to a powerfully possessive adult; as alternately clinging and shy, or intensely stubborn and negativistic; as terribly fearful of the sound of its own voice; as traumatized by abuse or non-abusive injury; as fighting intense family scapegoating with passive-aggressive silence. Interestingly enough, especially in light of Ada's character, the syndrome is thought by some to represent a strategy of active manipulation and control, rather than merely being a symptom of autistic withdrawal.

Campion compounds the enigma of Ada's condition by furnishing only the sparest details of her background or the early forces which have played upon her. She lives in a cloistered, mid-Victorian Glasgow home. The Piano's establishing sequence begins out of focus, as in a hypnogogic state. The camera peers at the emerging world through the lattice of a child's fingers, while Ada's six-year-old voice tells us she ceased speaking at that age, and does not remember why. (One notes that The Piano's narrative engine is propelled by the internal monologue of a character who cannot or will not speak—another compelling paradox spun out of Ada's mutism.)

She relates that her beloved father (neither he or any other family member is ever seen) has a strangely approving notion of her affliction as a "dark talent." He's arranged her marriage to a lonely expatriate English farmer in New Zealand. Quite possibly he is the recipient of her dowry.

In a trice Ada is whisked over the sea, dumped unceremoniously upon the New Zealand shore with her baggage, her precious piano, and her out-of-wedlock daughter Flora (Anna Paquin)—a precocious and voluble nine-year-old who is Ada's interpreter to the world. The two communicate through their own invented sign system.

Campion has kept the camera claustrophobically screwed down until now: Ada's instant voyage is literally embodied by the fragmented hands and torsos of the sailors carrying her from skiff to land (a locution the director used to underscore the heroine's schizoid isolation from an equally alienated husband in Sweetie). The mise-en-scène briefly opens out into a vista of stormswept grey sky, huge waves tumbling against a barren stretch of sand. One's view is then constricted again, and for the most part will remain so. Tight close-ups further accentuate the nuances of an unfolding and mute—or barely spoken—triangle of desire.

Stewart, Ada's new husband (Sam Neill), is stiff-upper-lip reticence personified: handsome, not unkind, but disastrously unimaginative. His narrow utilitarian purposes immediately oppress Ada's sensibility when he refuses to bring her instrument back to his plantation. In a breathtaking long shot the lone piano is limned starkly against the rolling surf: it's suddenly a vivid icon of cultural collision, of yet another stifling of Ada's voice, of her delivery into paltry domesticity in a startling alien environment.

Stewart's home is kept by gabbling, censorious female relatives. Ada and Flora retreat from a bizarre simulacrum of English gentility into their room and private world. The taciturn Stewart, unlike the rest of his clan (and much like Ada's father) accepts, even approves of Ada's disability ("There's something to be said for silence"). As frustration with his unconsummated marriage mounts, Stewart wonders if Ada might be mad as well as mute, yet grows ever more entranced with her.

Stewart's neighbor, Baines (Harvey Keitel), offers to purchase the beached piano from Stewart for 80 prime acres, with music instruction by Ada thrown into the bargain. (Campion permits an inference that the two men have previously done business, and—perhaps as a result—aren't altogether happy with each other.) Stewart agrees, hoping she can be drawn out of her shell. Baines makes an unprepossessing pupil. He's squat, illiterate, his face tattooed like the ribald Maoris who lounge about his ramshackle hut.

Baines offers to sell back the piano one key at a time in return for voyeuristic liberties with Ada's person. Apparently shocked at first, she nevertheless consents with her usual passivity; then piquantly shifts the grounds of what seems like a perverse, humiliating bargain, demanding more keys for each favor. Eventually the two lie together nude without making love; Hunter's unexpectedly voluptuous body is pressed against Keitel's compact, powerfully muscled, yet unglamorous frame—a moment both unutterably moving and incredibly erotic.

Baines grows disgusted with himself for engineering a degrading charade: he was instantly smitten with Ada, and could think of no other way to court her. When he proposes ending their "arrangement" and returning the piano to Stewart's house, she flies into a fury and quickly takes him to bed. One infers this is her first real passion. The relationship which engendered Flora seems to have been short-lived and cerebral, with a man Ada implies was too timorous to keep "listening" to the quicksilver mind and tumultuous roil of emotion hidden beneath her silence.

Stewart discovers the affair. In an exceptionally creepy scene, he peeps upon the trysting couple from underneath the floor of Baines' hut—he, not Baines, is revealed as the repressed voyeur. Enraged, he forbids her Baines' presence, literally penning her up in his house with the piano until she can be "good." Unaccountably, she appears to warm to her husband, and he gives her back her freedom.

Ada is next seen pressing her lips against her mirrored image, then caressing the piano's keys with a sensual backhand gesture. When she attempts to awaken Stewart with the same languours touch he cannot abide his arousal and rebuffs her. Rather than rejection, she feels release. It's subtly apparent that while one part of her has been dutifully attempting to shape herself to Stewart's limitations, the larger part has been using her husband as a substitute object—as well as her piano and her own reflected self. All are now metonyms of her rapturous infatuation with Baines.

She entrusts Flora to give Baines a piece of the piano's keyboard, upon which she has penned a testament of her love. In a jealous fit, Flora brings it to Stewart instead. At this moment, he represents the lesser of two evils, since he poses no threat to Flora's symbiotic attachment to her mother. But the child, caught up in fantasies of retaliation which are ultimately aimed at regaining her mother's affection, misgauges the potential for violence born out of Stewart's narcissistic injuries. Stewart takes an ax to the piano, then to Ada's hand. Amidst a welter of screams and blood, he awakens to a horrified recognition of his unleashed brutality—and to the impossibility of Ada's ever coming to heel, ever truly becoming his wife. Wishing only to be quit of her uncanny power over him—"I am afraid of her will!"—he relinquishes her to Baines.

Campion's tale sounds over-the-top penny-dreadful in the telling, but it's tremendously absorbing on the screen. The dark side of Eros is often diminished today: sexuality is chattered to death in the tabloids, on "Oprah," or in the clinic. The Piano restores the orphic power of sex. In the film's puritanical milieu, desire is filtered through murky Victorian notions about feminine purity or evil, through the era's fascination with the sway of the primitive, the savage imperatives of nature, the chilly balm of death.

The Piano's protagonists are intensely passionate. But Campion intimates they are also erotic naïfs (the men in particular), who confront sexuality as if it were newly minted in the disconcerting unfamiliarity of the New Zealand bush. Stewart can only follow the rulebook that stringently tutors him on patriarchal duty, feminine docility, the white man's imperial burden. Baines, who emigrated after being abandoned by his wife for reasons never explicated, is discovered sunk in debauched despair.

Ada is the most daring of the three in her struggles with Eros. It is moot whether some ungovernable childhood abuse, some terrible skepticism of ever being understood or cherished has driven her behind her wall of stillness. Her sea change liberates the extraordinary "will" that so infuriates (and intimidates) her husband. It surges forth with a force so primal as to seem impersonal to her, spurring an unruly independence—and a tender carnality which finds its match in the bosom of the no-less-wounded (and nearly as inarticulate) Baines.

The Piano's literary antecedents include those lurid Gothic romances replete with frail heroines, exotic locales, and masterful/sinister noblemen; the amours fous of Wuthering Heights and Tess of the D'Urbervilles; fairy tales with amour fou preoccupations, notably Beauty and the Beast and Bluebeard. By design or unconscious intention, Campion has adroitly reinterpreted such sources. Her work exemplifies the unique spin on Gothic strategems, inflected by the surreal peculiarities of "down under" nature, which has distinguished the cinema of Australia and New Zealand at least since Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1977). Stuart Dryburgh's photography of the deep aquamarine shade and rough, tangled vegetation of the New Zealand bush serves to highlight the protagonists' convoluted and excessive emotionality (as when the vengeful Stewart rushes upon Ada, and both become caught in a twisted mesh of ancient vine).

The Piano is true to its period in every respect (saving its music), while simultaneously addressing a host of issues dear to contemporary cultural critics and film scholars. Feminist theoreticians have notably explored the suppression of the feminine voice under patriarchy's insensible rule and the attendant possibility for recovering that voice at the very core of its suppression. In this context, Ada's muteness can be interpreted as a limit case of patriarchal domination, both symptom and countercoup.

In a much cited study, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" [published in Screen (1975)], Laura Mulvey asserts that classic Hollywood cinema treats woman as the object of male gaze; her disruptive sexuality must be neutralized by transforming her into a docile fetish, marrying her off, or killing her. Ada's two suitors attempt to "objectify" her by all of these measures (Stewart stops just short of murder). Yet Campion has her turn the tables and make Stewart and Baines helplessly enthralled objects of her gaze, her desire.

The arrogance and ignorance of the colonizing consciousness toward native culture and the parallel bewilderment, silent contempt, and resentment of the Maoris toward their English masters constitute a less visible, but no less crucial ideological subtext of The Piano. Stewart is horrified when he sees Flora and her Maori friends in semi-masturbatory play. What he takes for licentiousness betokens the Maori absence of Victorian childhood sexual repression (their taboos lie elsewhere).

During the colonists' staging of Bluebeard, the horrified locals rush upon the stage to prevent the butchering of the wives (presaging Stewart's savage attack upon Ada). The Maoris are indeed untutored in Western drama, but Campion's chief point here is that Bluebeard's sadistic intention toward his wives is deeply offensive to them.

While her sympathies are tilted toward the Maoris, Campion's perspective on settler as well as indigenous tribe is for the most part coolly balanced. The Maoris are not glorified (or degraded) as noble primitives. The director shows that they and the English are equally capable of being wrongheadedly amused or appalled by each other's Otherness. Nor is Stewart an unregenerate villain. His hopefulness about winning Ada's love in the face of her fierce disdain is as pitiable as his violence upon her is odious.

Sam Neill poignantly captures Stewart's uncomprehending pain over Ada's disaffection as well as his repellent paternalism. Anna Pacquin's Flora is a radiant delight. Harvey Keitel has created a galaxy of Caliban-like characters; The Piano shows him evolving into the light, Baines' defensive brutishness yielding to an amazing, grave sweetness.

But the film's complex heart belongs to Hunter. Her perky American roles (Broadcast News and Raising Arizona [1987], Always and Miss Firecracker [1989]) do not prepare one for the acute intelligence and volcanic sensuality spoken by the actress's pale face, her flashing eye, and her exquisitely tuned gestures. She transforms Ada's perennial black dress, bonnet, camisole, and bustle into a prison for her character's body and soul.

Hunter is also an able pianist; her rendition of Michael Nyman's score heightens her verisimilitude in the role. Nyman has often reworked earlier styles with a kind of Brechtian defamiliarization (e. g., his brittle deconstruction of Purcell in The Draughtman's Contract [1982]). In The Piano, he refuses to dissect or defamiliarize mid-nineteenth-century Romanticism, indeed makes little reference at all to the musical idioms of the period. Using New Age harmonies and plangent arpeggios, he has composed an elegiac improvisation on wild Scottish folk themes which would have proven bathetic in less skillful hands.

Voyaging with Baines to resettlement in urban New Zealand, Ada pitches her piano overboard lest the boat capsize. She becomes entangled in a rope, and is herself pulled over the side. She sinks into the deep, but to her utter amazement decides to free herself—"my will has chosen life!" The image dissolves to scenes of that life; her now adult voiceover relates that Baines has repaired Stewart's assault and provided her with a curious metallic finger. She has taken up teaching piano, is learning to speak haltingly again, and muses that she is probably viewed as the "town freak."

The conclusion of this intricate fable of feminine identity is ambiguous. In The Piano's enigmatic opening, a child peers at a world yet unborn through fingers which both hide and disclose. It's not precisely clear whether they belong to Ada or Flora. In retrospect, one speculates that Campion is meditating upon a Victorian girl's fascinated, terrified fantasies about her path toward sexual awakening.

For Ada, these fantasies unfold in an odyssey shot through with references to voyeurism, the primal scene, rape and castration fears—and an overarching anxiety over incestuous desire. It is moot whether Ada has been banished by her father to New Zealand in aid of improving his cash flow or has herself actively sought flight from an imperious, possibly seductive/abusive father who prized and perhaps enabled her loss of voice. Stewart may be interpreted as his neurotic reinvention; Baines, as embodying his gentler, more wholesome recuperation. One hopes Flora will find calmer seas. Campion offers subliminal hope that she may fare better than her mother, not least because Baines represents a father who can allow a woman a voice and space of her own.

But the director also intimates that her heroine's decision to voyage from the New Zealand wilds back to "civilized" life with Baines may constitute a sacrifice of her freer, darker nature, one that perhaps would not have occurred had there been no Flora. In jettisoning the piano, Ada seems compelled not only by the imperative of survival but also by the need to abjure the dangerous Dionysian thrust of her temperament. One is left with a ruling image of her eerily suspended in mid-ocean like some tenebrous, funereal blossom, before her "will" chooses a tamer Eros over the Thanatos which may well be the ultimate desire prefigured by her muteness.