The Piano: Gothic Gone South

Enter George Baines (Harvey Keitel), a former whaler, who operates in a film of doubles and polarities as a foil to Stewart. He has Maori facial tattoos and, more notably, a grasp of the Indigenous language. This singles him out as a settler who, beyond merely fetishizing difference, values cultural exchange over erasure, even as his dealings make him complicit in colonial land dispossession. Baines is illiterate, but that is no definitive lack in a film in which the dominant modes of verbal and written communication are mediums of corrupt power, and unlearning and resistance to indoctrination are prized as ways back to an authentic self. While Stewart retains an unreflective, arrogant confidence in his perceived right to lay claim to territory and family as extensions of himself, Baines endeavors to evolve past the logic of empire. He does model his relations with Ada on a system of exploitative commerce, exchanging land for the piano that Stewart assumed as his own to bargain, and initiating a secret trade whereby Ada can buy it back key by key with sexual favors. But as he connects with her musical voice and an unspoken affinity takes hold between them, his disgust with himself for taking advantage of her grows.

Their illicit trade deal is a source of inner conflict for Ada, rather than of outright repulsion, as its mutinous perversity creates a space for her to explore outside of Victorian repression and her husband’s control. Here as in much of Campion’s other work, there is little that is safe in the erotic. Not everyone is a killer, but all men are predatory in her arch, offbeat police procedurals In the Cut (2003) and Top of the Lake (a series whose 2013 first season was followed by another in 2017), with their risky border realms in which power is unpredictable, fear is close to desire, and easy assignations of who is victim and who is villain are suspensefully forestalled.

While sexual politics are front and center in The Piano, racial tensions are less overt. Maori characters remain on the sidelines but show up the spiritual paucity of a colonial mindset unfit for living in harmony with the natural environment. “What do they want it for? They don’t cultivate it, burn it back, anything. How do they even know it’s theirs?” says Stewart of the Indigenous people’s refusal to sell land that is tapu (sacred), because it holds the bones of their ancestors. The settlers, who seek dominion over an intimidating landscape as much to order their psyches as to turn resources to profit, have no connection to the land deeper than the stakes bearing his initials that Stewart hammers into it to mark the boundaries of his property.

“The film is lensed with a chilly, blue-hued gloom that echoes the emotional turmoil of the people plunging through it, taking us deep into the lyrical realm of the New Zealand gothic.”

Sweeping aerial shots in The Piano impress upon us the impenetrable vastness of the bush. The film is lensed with a chilly, blue-hued gloom that echoes the emotional turmoil of the people plunging through it, taking us deep into the lyrical realm of the New Zealand gothic. This postcolonial tendency, which portrays the landscape—dark, wet, and primordial—as a treacherous and haunted space, inspiring as much horror as romantic awe, was on the rise in the nineties. Touristic notions were subverted, as so-called God’s Own Country appeared on screens not as a congenial paradise but as a scenic crime scene. Biculturalism was being newly embraced, and Maori culture was undergoing a renaissance. Pakeha (white New Zealander) identity, and the murderous aspects of empire, were by extension up for heightened scrutiny and reexamination. If settler descendants bore the shame of their ancestors, Britain’s laboring servants and lackey plunderers, how were they to exorcise it in order to arrive at a new sense of themselves, in a land that had already long had a name, Aotearoa, and an established Indigenous culture that they had striven to suppress, and now still barely understood?

In The Piano, perhaps the most visible evidence of the incompatibility of the colonial project’s pretensions and the reality of the surrounding environment is the mud, which is everywhere, splashing Ada’s cumbersome skirts and bogging her down. As she poses in a lace gown with her husband for a photographic keepsake, before a curtained backdrop of a quaint European landscape, a thunderstorm buckets down, making the event into a cosmic joke. It’s a vision of near uninhabitability reminiscent of New Zealand filmmaker Vincent Ward’s Vigil (1984), which portrays a grieving girl’s quest for meaning on an isolated farm, after her sheep-farmer father falls down a crevasse to his death. “We’re heading for the South Pole!” exclaims her grandfather, as gale-force winds and heavy rain threaten to spill the family toward the end of the earth.

Maori mythologies by which the origins of the topography of their country can be understood are left unvoiced in The Piano, but the legacy of bloody war on which New Zealand was founded is never far from the surface. Chaos erupts during a performance of “Bluebeard,” the seventeenth-century French folktale warning of the dangers of transgressive female curiosity. The mock-bloodied heads of the aristocrat’s murdered wives arouse Maori indignation over the white man’s cowardice, and foreshadow the grisly domestic reprisal that awaits Ada. The play is an illusion, but the horror is all too real. As Stewart turns savage axe-wielder, descending a slope as angled as any German-expressionist manifestation of psychological disarray, to sever his wife’s index finger and deny her means of unsanctioned expression, Campion recognizes that the monstrousness often projected onto a racialized or gendered other can in fact be traced back to empire’s bloody maw.

The exquisiteness of the film’s craft was widely acknowledged. The Piano garnered a level of international acclaim previously unheard-of in New Zealand, as Campion became the first woman to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and Oscars went to her screenplay and the acting of Hunter and Paquin, for creating an enthralling mother-daughter relationship as ferociously headstrong in its battle of wills as it is insularly symbiotic and animated in its nonverbal mirroring. Meanwhile, back home, it seemed a new cinematic identity for Campion’s native country was emerging: a British Film Institute–commissioned personal take on the nation’s nascent industry by Neill concluded that New Zealand’s was a “cinema of unease.”