The Piano

(1993)

Directed by

Jane Campion

Review by Zach Saltz

In Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), the outwardly nebulous concept of a woman’s will serves as the central basis for understanding her inwardly repressed psyche.  The word “will” has been prescribed to mean many things -- will as an auxiliary verb, meaning to enable, or will as a noun, meaning an ardent desire or wish.  Will power refers to the strength or capability to withstand hardships.  Nietzsche wrote of an acerbic “Will to Power” serving as the central basis for the belief that innovators should make their own pragmatic values.  But the will of the central woman in The Piano has less to do with intrinsic potency of emotion or caustic control than a sort of supernatural prowess that ultimately determines her fate.  The will is not religious, but it has enough power to make its patients (or victims, depending on circumstance) question its motives just as people question the presence of an Almighty figure, and by the end of the film, this woman wonders why her will has let her live.

The woman, Ada (played by Holly Hunter), is immediately cast as an outsider upon arrival in the lush forest of New Zealand -- as both a mute, as a Scot, and (most egregiously) as a woman.  These characteristics naturally beg for discrepancy in initial appraisal of her: while the native Maoris are at first shocked at her pallid visage (“Look how pale,” one says about both Ada and her daughter, “like angels”), Stewart, her new husband, calls her “stunted” with a frigid look of disappointment.  This woman does not look like the figure in the photograph he has studied and subsequently used as a reflector to hastily comb his hair.  Of course how could he possibly be all that responsive to a mysterious woman he himself called a “dumb creature?” (His rationale for betrothal is that God, like him, loves dumb creatures, too.)

Invariably their marriage is a façade, and the only proof of its existence comes in the form of a shabbily-shot photograph of bride and groom passively sitting next to each other in the midst of a downpour.  Ada wears a silly gown that she defiantly rips off afterwards, and Stewart peeks through the camera, confident in his steadfast grasp of the time and setting.  This motif of peeking secretly through a hole will reverberate in a later scene when Stewart looks through a peephole in Baines’ wall to find a sight not quite so inhibited and under control.  The idea of control was very important in repressive Victorian society, and Ada’s illicit capitulation to Baines’ sexual blackmail coupled with the atmosphere of uninhibited Maoris represent stark backlash to the all-too-formal elements of the European society left behind by its white émigrés.

Stewart throughout the film seems profoundly unaware that he is living in rustic New Zealand rather than aristocratic England; he is so disillusioned that he cannot even understand the significance of the sacred Maori land he so vehemently desires.  “What do they want the land for?” He unabashedly laments to Baines.  “They don’t do anything with it.  They don’t cultivate it, they don’t burn it back, nothing.  How do they even know it’s theirs?”  In his eyes, the Maoris are savages, with their immoral nakedness and rambunctious sexuality.  Stewart asserts his cultured manners by wearing clean shirts and pants and a noble yet ultimately pitiful top hat.   Indeed, hearty scenes such as when Ada and Flora carefully tread through a massive pile of mud illustrate a rugged and bucolic atmosphere that reflect the insidiousness of Stewart’s proclamations of English male sensibility and decency. 

Baines, on the other hand, is a precursor to what Joseph Conrad must have been imagining when he created the character Kurtz in Heart of Darkness.  Here is a man who does not attempt in any way to announce his European roots, and instead fully assimilates into the Maori culture, speaking their language and painting his face with their symbolic illustrations.  His untidy clothes reflect his dismissal of “cultured society,” and indeed, an important element of The Piano (with its obvious Victorian roots) is the way in which clothes reflect the suppressive nature of hierarchical roles in the closed society.  Ada wears a tightly-fit corset with a bustle, and a hoop skirt that extends far beyond her tiny legs.  This leads to the film’s most erotically-charged moment, when the scruffy Baines, beneath the piano, spots a lone tiny hole in the fittings that sticks out like a sore thumb; and as he covers up the hole with his fingers, the viewer reads this as a sublimation of tender aggression toward the harsh formal society in which both characters have been deemed outcast.  

One motif of The Piano is that of bargaining.  Besides the negotiations aforementioned between Stewart and the Maoris, Ada is shamelessly used as a personal bargaining tool of Stewart to acquire 80 acres of land -- by agreeing to give Baines his wife’s piano.  When Ada begins to feebly teach Baines piano lessons, their sessions quickly turn into sensuous lovemaking as a result of a lurid offer to return the piano to its rightful owner.  The transformation of Ada is most clearly seen in her changing attitude toward Baines; at first, she is repulsed by him and is shocked by his brash attempts to caress her neck and “lie with him,” but there is no denying the economical benefits of succumbing to his fantasies (there are, after all, only 36 black keys on the piano).  But later when Baines gives the piano to Ada (as both a gift and a poignant artiface of a relationship he knows cannot last -- “It’s making you a whore and me wretched”), she insolently returns to his hut; for now it is not her beloved piano she seeks, but comfort -- both friendly and sexual -- that only Baines can offer her.  Hence, the initial illicit sexual bargaining beginning as a masochistic master-slave antagonism has blossomed into a renaissance of a deeper sense of necessity and greater self-worth.  In that sense, it is an exchange of wills -- the will to dominate through frivolous bargaining superseded by the will to love and satisfy in the idylls of mutual affection.

Of the many dichotomies in the film, the most pervasive lies between reality and illusion.  While the film itself is mostly void of formalistic elements (the only noticeable examples are the employment of Ada’s voiceover and the curious animation when Flora speaks of her father to Aunt Moorag), the invisible presence of Ada’s will always adds a supernatural atmosphere to the story, as if we are being told a legend or a fable out of place and time unblemished by modern encumbrances.  As in Gothic literature, pathetic fallacy serves as a barometer of emotions being played out, as the black rain begins to fall when Stewart discovers Ada’s gift to Baines (the “key” to her heart).  An earlier scene on the sunny beach featuring Flora performing ecstatic cartwheels represents the ephemeral joy that is found in the liberating yet sparse wide open spaces of the island.  And the underwater images toward the end, shot by director Campion in a wonderfully unusual stop-motion filming technique, represent Ada’s “underwater grave” beneath a sea of rapture -- not waving but drowning, to channel the famed Stevie Smith poem.

And that leads to the question of the ending, which some critics and viewers argue makes the film actually lose a certain profundity by being too conventional and “happy.”  In a story of such stark, lucid imagery and atmosphere, the “happily ever after” epilogue may seem oddly out of place.  When considering this, I am reminded of what Ursula Le Guin once wrote: “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness something stupid.  Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting” (336).  But the characters of The Piano have encountered so many struggles over the course of the film that the viewer is left with nothing but a fervent sense of hope that the story’s resolution will find them at a happy place for once.  Campion is keenly aware, however, of the sharp critical repercussions of a traditional happy ending to the stoic atmosphere the film has so meticulously maintained, and wisely chooses instead to focus the last images of The Piano on the stunning capabilities of Ada’s will to at once seemingly end her life while sparing it the very next moment.  This ambiguity of the ultimate path of Ada’s will has led Carol Jacobs to suggest that The Piano has not one or even two, but three entirely discrete endings, effectively leaving the viewer without the complete and total satisfaction of the “happy” ending with Ada teaching piano back in Nelson, but certainly not without some relief that she has been liberated from her prison on the island.  Despite the initial confusion, we are sure of one thing, as Ada so perfectly articulates: that her will has chosen life, simply and sweetly, and for this, we can surely all be thankful.

Rating:

# 2 of 1993