An insufferably pretentious movie

Rating: 3/10 (8 August 1999)

I absolutely hated this movie. I'm not against art films per se (I loved Bergman's "Wild Strawberries", for example), but this opus came across to me as pretentious feminist claptrap (and no, I'm not anti-feminist). It is never explained why the Holly Hunter character is mute, so I suppose we're to understand that her muteness is a great big metaphor for the silencing of woman in a patriarchal world. She expresses herself on the piano, OK. But the music she plays is New Age treacle; it made me long to hear Rachmaninoff or even Cecile Chaminade (real romantic music, not muzak). The utter brutality of Sam Neill cutting off her finger is totally unprepared for, but in this oh-so-symbolic film we're not supposed to find any sense or coherence on the realistic level, are we? (compare Dante, who works on both levels). By that point in the movie I was so exasperated by Hunter's utterly self-centered character that I wouldn't have cared if Neill had cut off her head! Harvey Keitel's native character is merely absurd when he makes love to the hole in her stocking. But after all, he's the "noble savage" who is so much more sensitive than the plebeian white exploiter of the natives that Neill represents. Since the native women mock Keitel as "old dry-balls," I suppose he's been saving himself for a truly western-style romance with Hunter, like something out of an 18th-century sentimental novel. At the film's end, when Hunter is tempted to follow her precious piano to the bottom of the sea, I was really hoping she would. But, of course, she has to AFFIRM LIFE and struggle back up to the surface of the water. To quote Fenimore Cooper's Chingachgook, "Ugh"!