THE PIANO: SILENCE IS GOLDEN

I grew up on movies that featured sharp, witty (or dramatic) dialogue, and have carried that into my adult movie viewing. Though there are of course other elements of the film to appreciate, if a movie has bad dialogue, that tends to make it go south for me, while if the movie has good dialogue, that may mask some of its flaws. Yet the power of silence in movies is almost as great as the power of good dialogue, provided you have the kind of performers and filmmakers who can communicate through silence. Jane Campion's THE PIANO, about a mute woman and two people who really can't communicate well, is a perfect example of communicating through silence.

The mute woman is Ada (Holly Hunter), a Scottish picture bride in 19th New Zealand. She's mute not by accident but by choice (in a nod perhaps to Liv Ullman's haunting portrayal of a mute by choice in Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA). She is able to speak, however; to us through voiceover at the beginning of the film, and to the world through her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), who interprets her sign language, and through her beloved piano, which she's taken on the voyage from Scotland to New Zealand. Once there, she meets her husband Stewart (Sam Neill), a farmer who seems baffled by her more than anything else. He also decides, after some effort by the Maori tribesman who work for him, that he can't take her piano to the house, and leaves it on the beach. This angers Ada, and she goes out and plays the piano on the beach. Baines (Harvey Keitel), one of the Maori working for Stewart, hears her play and tells Stewart he'll take the piano. He also tells a further outraged Ada that he'll give the piano back to her, but at a price; for everything he's allowed to do to her sexually, she gets a key or so back, until she gets the whole piano.

This may sound like the bizarrest kind of rape fantasy, but Campion knows what she's doing here. In the Victorian or Gothic literature that Campion is turning upside down here, women were meant to be seen as repressed creatures. Ada starts out repressed here - she's certainly not interested in Stewart - but she learns to communicate as well through her body as well as her face (even when she's not signing, we can always tell her feelings) and her piano playing (which Hunter did herself). And you could rightly argue that the men here are the sex objects - watch, for example, the scenes where, after being with Baines, Ada studies Stewart's body. Baines, on the other hand, is a brutish figure at first, but we find that he too is unable to communicate his feelings. This leads to what some dubbed as the de rigeur Keitel naked scene - this time it's as he's walking around the piano, thinking of Ada - but it's powerfully done. And while Stewart is ignored by Ada, he's simply seen as someone who is more traditional and unable to communicate with her, until he discovers her betrayal, after which he communicates through a shocking act. The only one of the foursome who is normal in this respect is Flora, who is able to talk to everybody, but will sometimes say the wrong thing.

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