`The Piano' Lesson -- Jane Campion's Romance Is An Example Of Passionate Filmmaking, Storytelling, Acting

Movie review

XXXX "The Piano," with Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill and Anna Paquin. Written and directed by Jane Campion. Egyptian and Seven Gables. "R" - Restricted because of nudity, mature subject matter. -------------------------------------------------------------------

To see "The Piano" is to be reminded just how immature and insignificant most films really are. For the 121 timeless minutes that it takes for its 19th-century love triangle to reach an apex of passion and enigmatic beauty, this strikingly original film consistently explores uncharted territory, not simply in terms of surprising developments but in the essential purity of its vision.

Demonstrating the kind of self-assurance that few filmmakers can boast after 30 films, much less three, New Zealand-born Jane Campion has followed her "Sweetie" and "An Angel at My Table" with her finest film to date - a multiple award-winner that continues to reveal its power long after the screen goes dark.

Key to the film's success is Campion's screenplay, a poetically unconventional mix of dominant imagery and Gothic romance containing what Holly Hunter astutely describes as "a vast dimension of things being unexplained."

Understanding the intent and value of this element of mystery, Hunter gives a fiercely expressive and complex performance (earning her this year's best actress award at Cannes and a certain Oscar nomination) as Ada, a young Scotswoman, mute (but not deaf) since age 6, who arrives by boat with her 9-year-old daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), and her beloved piano, to enter into an arranged marriage in the remote bush region of New Zealand.

When her repressed, Victorian English husband, Stewart (Sam Neill), refuses to transport Ada's piano from the beach to his home, it sets an ominous tone for their forced union; she's not what he expected from a mail-order bride, and he has rashly deprived her of her musical "voice."

The suffocating stiffness of their nonrelationship opens the door to Baines (Harvey Keitel), a Maori settler who has distanced himself from his fellow tribesmen, and whose need for identity, family and love is focused by his attraction to Ada. After buying the piano from Stewart, he proposes an arrangement that ignites the film's passionate fire: He will sell the piano back to Ada, key by key, in exchange for a series of "lessons" - increasingly intimate encounters that inevitably lead to an emotionally wrenching confrontation.

The word "sensuous" quickly comes to mind with regard to the film's sexual tension and release, but it applies with equal vitality to Campion's masterful use of atmospheric setting, enhanced sound and especially music, aided immeasurably by Hunter's own playing and Michael Nyman's evocative score.

All of these elements give the film its substantial context and foreshadow, but it's the performances that give it life. Supported only by the voice-overs that eloquently open and close the film, Hunter conveys volumes of emotion without speaking a word, her expressions deepened by the remarkably perceptive Paquin as Flora, who achieves a symbiosis with Hunter that even the finest director could only pray for.

Continuing his phenomenal career resurgence, Keitel's performance provides the flip side to his repulsive portrayal in "Bad Lieutenant," equally primitive and vulnerably open, but noble and forthright in its honesty. And it's important to note that Neill is not a villain in Campion's estimation; to think so would diminish the complexity of a performance that is more finely shaded than it initially seems.