The Piano
Directed by Jane Campion
- drama
- romance
The story
When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited pre-teen daughter Flora to the wilderness of 19th-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.
What it’s like
Dense green bush and grey Pacific light, with the film's most striking images built from wet sand, pale fabric and the stark black of a piano washed up on a shore. Jane Campion frames her 19th-century New Zealand with a painterly, almost unbearable stillness: long takes where the camera holds back, the sea roaring against silence, and a palette of ochre, slate and muddy green that feels damp to the touch. Michael Nyman's repeating piano score is spare and obsessive, a sound that clings like the rain itself. The vibe is brooding, erotic and strange, a slow-burn melancholy with flashes of wry humour. Its pace is deliberate, and its people move through a cramped, sexually charged emotional tangle, a woman who has retreated into silence slowly finding her own voice. Intensity is moderate: some tense domestic cruelty, a sharp act of violence, and frank sexual content including nudity and an intimate, unsettling erotic scene that is more charged than explicit. Suited to a late, rain-soaked evening alone, for viewers who want adult romantic drama that is unhurried, sensual and uncompromising about power and desire.
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