passion, not love

Rating: 8/10 (31 May 2001)

Interpretation, spoilers:
The box for this movie states, "only one man (Harvey Keitel) understands that Ada's heart can only be won through her beloved piano." I must disagree. After decades of hollywood love stories, we now have a love movie schema to use in watching and interpreting films of this sort. Expressed in words, it might be something like "love conquers all" or something of the such. Implied in this schema is that the love is of extraordinary meaning and almost heavenly. It's a nice sort of message, but it biases our movie-watching experience; i.e. 'the Piano.'
Though Ada's love for Harvey is of a merely carnal, animalistic sort, this should not interfere with the power of this movie. After the move, a dichotomy between the white man and the aborigines is formed. The white man represents propriety and decorum. The aborigines represent primitive human passion and unrefinement. Case in point: the scene in which the daughter is chastised for playing the aborigine tree-humping game. This point is further illustrated by Ada's confining wardrobe and aborigine/Harvey chats about his need for a woman. Thus, Harvey is associated with the primitive bodily passions of the aborigines.
It is this passionate essence of Harvey that attracts Ada to him. It would be ridiculous to claim that the piano in which Harvey blackmailed Ada and nearly prostituted her with made them fall in love (It did in a purely indirect phsyicalist way by bringing them together, it was the passion that made them actually fall in love.) The fact that the piano is not equated with love is the fact that Ada's feelings remain the same after the piano is brought to Same Neill's house.
Two types of expression are prominently displayed in this movie: through music and through passion/body. After Harvey teaches Ada to communicate with passion, her piano is no longer needed. Music is renounced and passion taken up. However, with the passion option, a living-in-the-present will comes along. This will follows the dictates of her every desire and she cannot control it. It causes her to flirt with death, but her next split second decision to free herself affirms life. Living passionately, the only constant in her non-meditative will is her will to live.

Perhaps a more than carnal love develops later. This is alluded to with her transcending over bodily communication to actual language. But, the movie itself is not a love story of the typical sort, and I for one am all for showing the love-aspects of each type of love-relationship. I think the main message is that even passionate love is a worthwhile love, and if anything "conquers all," it is the will to live.