The Piano Details

Inspired by Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, director Jane Campion's superbly staged tale of passion and obsession won her an Oscar for best screenplay. Like her earlier films Sweetie and An Angel at My Table, a three-hour biopic of writer Janet Frame, The Piano focuses on a woman whom society has dismissed as disabled. However, Holly Hunter's Ada McGrath (who chose to stop speaking at the age of six) can communicate through her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), and the piano she brings with her to New Zealand when she is sent from Scotland to marry local landowner Sam Neill. The ability to make contact is one of the film's key themes. Ada's new husband can read her hurriedly written notes, but he does not appreciate her music and won't take the trouble to learn either her sign language or the local Maori dialect. The illiterate Baines (Harvey Keitel), on the other hand, has fully embraced the customs of his adopted home and, belying his uncouth outward appearance, proves to be much more tender and passionate than his social superiors. With their tight corsets and unwieldy skirts, the fashions of Victorian times are synonymous in the film with women's repression. Yet while Ada's clothing (expertly designed by Janet Patterson) is an inconvenience in the bush and nearly costs her her life, it saves her from her husband's advances and, eventually, proves the means to her liberation. There's a masterly score by Michael Nyman and splendid photography from Stuart Dryburgh, and Campion coaxes stupendous performances from Hunter and Paquin, who both won Oscars — Neill and Keitel were shamefully overlooked.

"...A severely beautiful, mysterious movie that, as if by magic, liberates the romantic imagination....[The] principal performances are extraordinary..."