The outcome of her story is much more subtle and surprising than Baines' crude original offer might predict.Ĭampion has never made an uninteresting or unchallenging film (her credits include ' Sweetie,' about a family ruled by a self-destructive sister, and ' An Angel at My Table' (the autobiography of writer Janet Frame, wrongly confined for schizophrenia). She understands better the eroticism of slowness and restraint, and the power that Ada gains by pretending to care nothing for Baines. Jane Campion, who wrote and directed 'The Piano,' does not handle this situation as a man might. He'll give her one for taking off her jacket.

Baines invites her over to play, and thus begins his singleminded seduction, as he offers to trade her the piano for intimacy. He explains that they all make sacrifices and she must learn to, as well. 'That is MY piano - MINE!!' Ada scribbles on a note she hands to Stewart. He is a former whaler who lives alone, and he likes the music of the piano - so much that he trades Stewart land for the piano. One day she goes down to the beach to play the piano, and the music is heard by Baines ( Harvey Keitel), a roughhewn neighbor who has affected Maori tattoos on his face. No intimacy grows between Ada and her new husband. He does not mind quiet women, is one way he puts it.Īda and Flora settle in.

It says something that Stewart cares so little for his new bride that he does not want her to have the piano she has brought all the way from Scotland - even though it is her means of communication. Stewart and his laborers, local Maori tribesmen, take one look at the piano crate and decide it is too much trouble to carry inland to the house, and so it stays there, on the beach, in the wind and rain. This is not the sound of my voice it is the sound of my mind.' Ada communicates with the world through her piano, and through sign language, which is interpreted by her daughter. 'I have not spoken since I was 6 years old,' Ada's voice tells us on the soundtrack.

They have been rowed ashore, along with Ada's piano, to meet a local bachelor named Stewart ( Sam Neill), who has arranged to marry her. The film opens with the arrival of a 30ish woman named Ada ( Holly Hunter) and her young daughter, Flora ( Anna Paquin), on a stormy gray beach. It is a story of shyness, repression and loneliness of a woman who will not speak and a man who cannot listen, and of a willful little girl who causes mischief and pretends she didn't mean to. It tells a story of love and fierce pride, and places it on a bleak New Zealand coast where people live rudely in the rain and mud, struggling to maintain the appearance of the European society they've left behind. 'The Piano' is as peculiar and haunting as any film I've seen.

The piano by jane campion