The Piano

Ada, a mute Scottish woman, arrives in colonial New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century with her young daughter for a marriage arranged to a settler she has never met. Her piano is left on the beach, then traded to a neighbour, Baines, who offers to return it to her one key at a time in exchange for lessons that soon become something else.

Campion became the first woman to win the Palme d'Or, and serious critics read the picture as an uncommon account of female desire told from a woman's vantage. They praised its sensory texture and the force of Holly Hunter's wordless performance. Later feminist writing has questioned the romanticised colonial frame and the thin roles given to the Maori characters around the central triangle.

For a psychodynamic clinician, the film stages muteness as its own form of speech, with feeling carried by the piano, the body and a daughter who voices her mother's will. The bargaining over the instrument holds questions of desire, possession and consent, and the distance between what is said and what is meant stays open throughout.