Recencies van critici

With The Piano, Jane Campion gives us one of the strongest female characters of the late 20th century, entangled in a story that is as vast, as dark and as deep as the ocean itself.

But what’s most striking of all [about The Piano] is the sheer sensory appeal of the film, which envelops its melodramatic story in sumptuous colors and textures, expertly supplied by cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, and a score blending Michael Nyman’s artfully repetitive riffs with a mellow romanticism unusual in his work.

Some 25 years since its initial release, The Piano remains a remarkable and poignant meditation on female power disguised as a love story for the ages.

A second viewing of The Piano allowed me to see how unique it is. And yes, there are literary qualities: it has echoes of Angela Carter and Peter Carey, but these only add to its intelligence and distinction. And there is a fierce performance from Holly Hunter, whose face radiates intensity and enigma.

Touch creates its own language. In The Piano (1993), Jane Campion's gorgeous, Gothic romance, it speaks multiple dialects... The Piano turns on the complexity of meanings associated with touch – desire, control, liberation, risk, power, pleasure, and violence... In particular, the economy of touch between Ada and Baines explores how sexual desire between women and men is a bargain in which power relations are repeatedly renegotiated over shifting ground.

With The Piano, Campion proved the financial and creative worth of female film-makers was more than equal to their male counterparts, and that intelligent, female-centric narratives could strike a resounding chord with audiences.

[Campion] offers something more starkly, strangely beautiful than most costume dramas, and the whole film puts a fresh spin on the traditional love story. The characters are stubborn and inward-looking, and it's the refusal to sentimentalise that makes this harsh tale of obsession so moving.

Delicate, sensitive and literate, [The Piano] admittedly has a selective appeal, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more serenely sensual or visually ethereal film.

All the scenes involving Ada, her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) and Baines are superb – stylistically bold, with always surprising rhythmic flows and performance gestures. But both the energy and the artistry dissipate whenever Ada's hapless, repressed husband Stewart (Sam Neill) appears, or when Campion cuts to a gaggle of Victorian nannies or a noble chorus of Maoris for dramatic counterpoint... At its centre, however, The Piano is a commanding, passionate, poetic film.

The metaphorical transformations of speech into music and music into sex — like the literal transformations of both sign language and Maori into English speech and subtitles — only clarify the extent to which this is really a film about discourse, including film language itself.

[The Piano] is a tonic for the tired soul... It offers a complete way of seeing, an uncompromised view of the world by a writer-director whose command of the visual and emotional aspects of filmmaking is fearless and profound.

“The Piano” is as peculiar and haunting as any film I’ve seen... It is one of those rare movies that is not just about a story, or some characters, but about a whole universe of feeling – of how people can be shut off from each other, lonely and afraid, about how help can come from unexpected sources, and about how you’ll never know if you never ask.