The Piano (Campion, 1993)
Welcome to the newsletter that can recommend Talladega Nights, Green Lantern and Pokémon Detective Pikachu, and also 1993 Palme d’Or winner The Piano. We contain multitudes.
In the most recent (2022) Sight & Sound critics poll of the best films ever made The Piano made it into the top 50.
Over at RNZ I am slowly working my way through that list of 50 films and wrote about The Piano here:
The Piano has similar preoccupations to Campion’s previous work – namely the impossibility for a woman to live a fully realised and uncompromised life in a world dominated by men. By setting her story in colonial New Zealand, she makes the bargains or contingencies that women had to make to survive very clear – and tragic.
Holly Hunter plays Ada, a mute Scottish single mother with a nine-year-old daughter, forced into a marriage of convenience halfway around the world. Her new husband is Alisdair (Sam Neill), one of those ‘second sons’ forced to make his way in the colonies when there is nothing for him to inherit back home. He busies himself trading blankets and muskets for land and wondering whether this strange, “stunted” woman is worth all the trouble he is going to.
Her great love – apart from daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) – is the piano she has had shipped over with her and that is left on the beach to ruin. Mysterious ex-whaler Baines (Harvey Keitel) spots an angle for himself and arranges it to be transported through the bush to his house.
And so begins an erotically charged melodrama in which the piano – and access to it – becomes currency between Ada and the two men who are competing for her affections. How much will she have to sacrifice in order to maintain the independent inner life that is so important to her?
Where can I find The Piano?
NZ Digital: You can stream it on Netflix or Neon
Aus Digital: Streaming on Netflix, Foxtel and Stan.
USA Digital: Streaming on Paramount+
UK Digital: Apparently not available via streaming or digital rental.
Obviously, these details can shift around a bit as titles move between streamers. No guarantees of accuracy after today.
There’s a beautiful Criterion 4K version for those that still love physical media. UHD discs are not region coded.
