THE PIANO
Given how sexy and volatile it is, it’s no surprise that The Piano is a hit. It’s also no surprise, given the strong-arm tactics of the distributor and the hype of some reviewers, that a certain critical backlash is already setting in, as evidenced by a lucid and considered dissent by Stuart Klawans in the Nation and a rather lazy dismissal by Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic. People like myself who are passionate fans of Jane Campion’s previous work may be somewhat churlish that many other people are finding their way to her work only after it has become juiced up, simplified, and mainstreamed–like the people who bypassed the dreamy finesse of Eraserhead on their way to the relative crudeness of Blue Velvet. It’s certainly regrettable that viewers who weren’t interested in seeing Campion’s 1989 film Sweetie until after they saw The Piano now have to contend with a lousy video transfer that doesn’t begin to do justice to Campion’s colors and compositions. (Wouldn’t this be a good time to strike off some new 35-millimeter prints of Sweetie for a rerelease? And I, for one, would love to get a chance to see Campion’s 1986 TV feature, Two Friends, which has never been available here in any form.)
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Both of Campion’s theatrical features are bold expressionist works about female sexual desire that make free and idiosyncratic use of central metaphors–though here their similarities end, and it will be interesting to see whether Campion’s next feature, an adaptation of Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady, bears any relationship at all to this pattern. In Sweetie, the principal drama is between two antagonistic sisters–one of them sexually repressed and neurotic, the other completely uninhibited and psychotic–and the central metaphor is trees. Though a couple of trees actually figure in the plot, Campion mainly uses trees as a poetic organizing image in the consciousness of Kay, the neurotic sister, who narrates the film: she gets us to think about family trees, planted and uprooted lives, unseen depths and giddy elevations, blooming versus dying, and various forms of encroachments and entanglements.
Much later, however, a scene between mother and daughter informs us that Flora was fathered by Ada’s teacher (presumably music teacher), whom Ada communicated with telepathically: “I didn’t need to speak; I could lay thoughts out in his mind like they were a sheet,” read the subtitles. But they didn’t get married because “after a while he became frightened and he stopped listening,” and after Flora was born “he was sent away.” The conclusion of Ada’s “explanation”–“I think he’s looking for us now all across the world, across the red sea”–sounds about as mythological as the elves, fairies, and lightning bolt in Flora’s account.
The position Ada puts herself in also bears some relation to arguments about Madonna “being in control of her own image”–unlike, say, Marilyn Monroe, who comprises part of the image Madonna allegedly controls–and strikes me as being about equally questionable. This isn’t to say that men and women shouldn’t be allowed to entertain and enjoy sexual fantasies. (Personally I get plenty of kicks out of Campion’s film, a stray few out of Madonna’s music videos, and none at all out of the Silence of the Lambs tango.) But squaring such kicks with an idealist political agenda is difficult–especially if you’re going to sweep the issue of male coercion hurriedly under the carpet; the barter arrangements in both The Silence of the Lambs and The Piano are proposed and launched by the men, and the women’s initial response to them are recoil and resistance. And when Ada’s libido finally runs free of male coercion toward the end of the picture Campion seems far from endorsing the consequences. (It’s clear, for one thing, that Ada’s independence hurts her relationship with Flora, and before long she’s ready to chuck the piano and herself, too.)
