FTV Blog 10: The Piano

Very melodramatic, increasingly so towards the end. My favourite part was the climax where Sam Neill's character drags Ada back during the huge storm and he cuts her finger off. I'm not being sadistic or anything but it was deliciously dramatic, a proper spectacle. Having said that, the main reason I didn't like The Piano was for the melodrama. The characters behaved in a way that was surreal. They made strange, unbelievable decisions, like Baines' method of seducing Ada (and, in turn, Ada's puzzling affection for Baines). The story operated on a level that I didn't empathise with.

This is a clear pattern across the three Jane Campion films we watched: the whole thing was like a woman's strange fantasy. Every aspect of The Piano is heightened to increase the sexual repression, which grows the fantasy. It's in the remote forest, few people around; set in the 19th Century when sex was a far less discussed topic and the was certainly less sexual liberty; the protagonist, incredibly, is unable to speak yet she has two strong, handsome men fighting over her.

The movie reminded me of Porphyria's Lover, an 1836 poem by Robert Browning in which a psychotic man murders his lover, a pale woman who meets him in his small cottage during a cold, stormy English night.

We were asked to take notes on symbolism, setting and mis en scène, and for the latter I got absolutely nothing. I know what it means and I know what it entails but I find it impossible to take notes on it when watching a movie. To me it's a matter of either stating the obvious or looking too deeply and pulling meaning out of thin air. I won't do either.

I did, however, not that the titular instrument was a very direct, clear (it must be obvious if I realised it) symbol for Ada's voice, emotions, mood, etc. both in diegetic and non-diegetic score. You could also make a case for the piano representing Ada's heart or where her affections lie.

As for the setting, I note that the lush forest was not a typical paradisaical beauty but a dark, menacing landscape of nightmarish scale with difficult, ghoulish terrain. This adds to Campion's fantasy--have the love triangle developed in a larger settlement, say in a Scottish city or even Sydney cove, it would have been far less powerful (nor would that setting have allowed for some narrative aspects, like the piano left on the beach, the lack of characters/places for Ada to escape to early on).