A haunting romance

Rating: 9/10 (26 February 2003)

Erotic and emotionally powerful, "The Piano" tells of a haunting romance that swells on the waves of pride, Victorian prudishness, and passion. The four main characters embody the times and social attitudes. Mute and cold and bargained through an arranged marriage, Ada arrives on the island with her mischievous young daughter and her precious piano. Her new husband Stewart is a socially inhibited and emotionally repressed English settler who has a penchant for mistrusting others. He decides that the piano is to be left on the beach where they disembarked, in the rain and weather because of the trouble it would be to move it piano into the settlement. He fails to see how important the piano is to his bride; how it is her only means of expression. The fourth character, Baines, is another English settler, quiet and isolated, who comes to be the most complex of all.

"The Piano" is gray and dank like the emotions that burden the settlers as they attempt to maintain a semblance of western civilization in a rainy island settlement surrounded by Maori natives who adopt the apparel of their new neighbors, but not their repressed notions of self and society. Only Baines has embraced native ways, and it is he who brings those moments of emerging tenderness and truth.
The pace of this film matches the pace of the seduction, beginning with slow caution and rejection, moving carefully through the strangest courtship ever, to its resolution, fraught with loss and sacrifice.

"The Piano" won many awards, including three Oscars; it deserved every one of them.