There is also the troubling notion that Ada has to choose between sex and art. There is no sense of sisterhood between the film’s female characters indeed, Ada’s own daughter betrays her. The film marked the first occasion when a female film director won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the second occasion when a female was nominated for best director at the Academy Awards.Īda may survive attempted rape, sexual blackmail and extreme domestic violence, but the Oscar-winning screenplay leaves her to choose between her cold, rapey husband, and her hot, bothered, rapey suitor. In 1993 Jane Campion's The Piano was heralded as a feminist text and with good reason.

Slowly Ada warms to her blackmailer, in stark contrast to her chilly marital relations at home.

The instrument is instead purchased by Baines, who strikes a deal with Ada: she can earn her piano back one key at a time, by playing at his home while he does “things he likes”. Travelling with a Maori crew and Baines (Keitel) – an old sailor who has “gone native” enough to have facial tattoos – her husband comes to collect Ada and Flora but refuses to transport Ada’s piano back to his house. Ada is mute but she expresses herself by playing the piano and through sign language, with her young daughter, Flora (Paquin), acting as translator. In the mid-19th century, Scottish woman Ada McGrath (Hunter) is sold by her father into marriage to a New Zealand frontiersman named Alisdair Stewart (Neill).

The piano movie jane campion