The Piano

Judged on structure, and the spine resists the subtractive test. The piano left on the beach is the cause of everything, since Stewart will not carry it and Baines will. The trade of the piano for eighty acres makes Ada’s voice a piece of property; the bargain of one black key per visit turns the lessons into a ledger that counts down; the key inscribed for Baines and carried by Flora to Stewart is the hinge; the axe answers the key, a finger for a key. The Bluebeard pageant is required. Counted in full, the give is real: Aunt Morag and Nessie repeat the settlement’s gossip more than they advance anything, Stewart’s hearing Ada’s voice and releasing her is a convenience the plot needs, and the Nelson coda, after the sea has settled the drama, is permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: a woman’s silence is not an absence but a will, and the men around her read it as one or the other according to whether they want to own her or to know her. Stewart buys land and a wife on the same principle and treats both as title. Baines begins by buying access, key by key, learns that a bought intimacy makes her a purchase and him a buyer, and gives the piano back. Much of this is disclosed through image and touch. What holds the axis three tenths below the bar of the Epochal Gate: the bargain’s coercion is let turn into romance with less scrutiny than its premise asks, and the colonial truth beside it is glimpsed rather than opened, since the Māori who will not sell their burial ground mirror Ada and are not given the film’s attention.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of two kinds, wild beauty and dread. The landing: a piano crated on an empty black-sand beach in surf, and the shot from above of it left there at dusk. The return to the beach, Ada playing while Flora dances and turns cartwheels at the tide line. The bush as a drowned world, feet sucking in mud, the trunks lit blue-green. The pageant’s shadow axe; the axe in the rain, Flora’s white pinafore, the finger on the block. The summit is the sea: Ada pulled down by the rope around her foot, hanging in green water above the sinking piano, then kicking free to the light. What holds it at 8.5: the middle hour’s lessons are rhythmic rather than rising, and Nyman’s theme lifts less on each return.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The myth is built. Bluebeard is load-bearing: staged as a shadow play at the Christmas pageant, a husband’s axe raised over a wife who opened the forbidden door, and then enacted by Stewart in the rain over a wife who gave away what was his. The film stages the myth as a cheap entertainment and then makes it true. Beneath it lies Philomela, the woman silenced who speaks through her art and is mutilated for what she tells, and the sea-burial and rising is a drowning and rebirth, with the instrument as the self left on the sea floor. Baines, a European with Māori moko, is the beast gentler than the gentleman. What holds the axis a tenth above the gate and no higher: Philomela and the beast are evoked around a Bluebeard that alone carries weight.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is the period literary romance of early-1990s prestige cinema, the Brontës’ Gothic of passion on wild ground behind it, and the colonial settler film. The turns are real: the romance told from inside a woman’s desire, with the man’s body looked at and the woman’s the one that chooses; a heroine who never speaks; a sexual bargain at the centre of a romance; the Gothic moved to the New Zealand bush and its mud; an ending that refuses the romance’s death for a surfacing and a metal finger. The stake: an original screenplay, a third feature by a director known for small, odd films, Sweetie and An Angel at My Table, on a modest independent budget. Held a tenth below the gate because the form is classical by design, and the costume picture absorbed it readily.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that Ada’s voice is not in words. The form is made of the not-said: the heroine silent, her speech carried by a child who edits and lies in translation, so that every exchange passes through a third party with her own interest; the piano as speech, played by the actress, so that the music is the character speaking rather than a score commenting; touch as language, from the lessons to the stocking to the hand on Stewart’s back. Dryburgh’s palette divides the worlds. What holds it at 8.5: the voice-over, prologue and epilogue both, explains what the film had already shown, and the Nelson coda is filmed as a container for an outcome rather than as the form’s own conclusion.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Thirty-three years of return are evidence. The film has carried a sustained criticism: feminist readings of desire, voice and the gaze; postcolonial readings of the Māori and the land, which press against it; arguments over consent, whether the bargain is a violation the film romanticises or a coercion it shows being undone; the double ending, and whether the surfacing is a true choice or a concession; Flora’s betrayal and what she is to her mother. These stay open, and the form yields on return: the key and the finger, the mud and the sea, the rope coil the film shows before Ada steps into the canoe. What holds it lower: the yield clusters on a few questions, consent, voice and the colony, all present at release, and the film has been argued over more than it has deepened.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Released in 1993; the field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is a demonstration that a period romance could be told from inside a woman’s desire, with the erotic carried by touch and music rather than dialogue, and with the woman’s will rather than her fate as its subject. That reorganised the costume romance more than it reorganised cinema. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film became a reference point for later films of women’s desire in period dress, a line of descent that is asserted more than demonstrated and is discounted as such. Its prizes and its wide audience are presence, not proof. Four tenths below the gate: its formal grammar was not taken up widely, and the line it opened is a strand of the costume picture rather than of the art.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-three years. The form is whole: one released version, complete, with any restoration a repair. Presence has been continuous and wide: exhibition and re-release, every home format, teaching, and Nyman’s music in wide circulation of its own. Thirty-three years have shown survival without proving it long. A tenth is charged to the surface: the treatment of the Māori, set at the edge as chorus and comic relief, and the romance of a coercive bargain are the parts most fixed to their moment and most argued against since, and they are the parts by which the film may age. The fabric, 35mm colour of its decade, is the smallest charge. The axis meets the bar of the Epochal Gate exactly.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The making bears weight in most departments. Holly Hunter’s performance is made of carriage, hands and eyes, and she plays the piano herself, so that the playing is the character’s speech. Anna Paquin’s Flora, a child’s mimicry, temper and guile, is exact. Keitel plays tenderness under a rough surface without softening it; Neill makes a cold man pitiable. Stuart Dryburgh gives the bush and the beach their two climates, and the underwater ending has real weight. Nyman’s score, built for the instrument, is placed as Ada’s voice. The charges hold the axis at 8.5: the Māori scenes are staged as background and comedy, a failure of the making as well as of the seeing; Morag and Nessie are played broad; the voice-over is a device the film did not need twice; and the coda’s flat light and costume-drama blocking fall below the rest.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Aunt Morag’s chatter over a chamber pot and her gossip with Nessie, and Ada hanging tethered in the dark sea above her piano. One law governs much: possession against will, the world as a set of titles to bodies, land and instruments, and the self as what refuses title. The pageant, the trade for acres, the Māori refusal to sell the burial ground, the ledger of keys, the finger and the piano put over the side all obey it, from comedy to the axe. The strain holds the figure: Morag and Nessie belong to a lighter film; the Māori are made to obey the law as background rather than as people, so the law bends where it should hold most; and the coda, with its metal finger and speaking lessons, softens the law into reward.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Judged on what a film of about 121 minutes holds. Consciousness: Ada’s, fully, through image and music; Flora’s, a child’s, fully; the two men’s through their acts. The family: a mother and daughter bound and turned, a marriage arranged and failed. Labour and money: land bought and cleared, a piano traded for acres, a bargain kept as a ledger. The colony, the natural order of sea and bush held as forces, art as voice, the sacred in a burial ground, a pageant and a drowning. What holds the axis lowest: every order passes through one woman and one house; the colony and the Māori are held at the edge rather than integrated; the state and the law are absent; and history is setting more than order. The New World (8.4), on the same ground, holds the native world and the colony as orders, and this film does not.

Score: 7.3 / 10