The Piano
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Synopsis
With this sublimely stirring fable of desire and creativity, Jane Campion became the first woman to win a Palme d’Or at Cannes. Holly Hunter is achingly eloquent through silence in her Academy Award–winning performance as Ada, an electively mute Scottish woman who expresses her innermost feelings through her beloved piano. When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter (Anna Paquin, in her Oscar-winning debut) to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her ineffectual husband (Sam Neill) and a rugged frontiersman (Harvey Keitel) to whom she develops a forbidden attraction. With its sensuously moody cinematography, dramatic coastal landscapes, and sweeping score, this uniquely timeless evocation of a woman’s inner awakening is an intoxicating sensory experience that burns with the twin fires of music and erotic passion.
Picture 8/10
The Criterion Collection presents Jane Campion's The Piano on Blu-ray in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1. The film is presented on a dual-layer disc with a 1080p/24hz high-definition encode sourced from a 4K restoration, which in turn was scanned from the 35mm A/B negatives. I am reviewing off of the Blu-ray disc that is included with the 4K UHD edition that Criterion has released simultaneously. The standard Blu-ray edition lacks the 4K disc but the releases are otherwise the same.
This new presentation is a sharp looking one, thanks primarily to the base restoration. Things have been cleaned up immaculately and I don't recall a single blemish ever popping up. The image is crisp and sharp delivering an excellent amount of detail in every shot, from the barren beach to the densely wooded village. The film has a heavy blue bias thanks to filters used during filming (this is touched on in the features), but colours are still quite bold, and the gradients are clean.
Where the Blu-ray falls a bit short is in handling some of the darker interiors. The 4K edition does an impressive job in rendering all of the finer details in the shadows but the Blu-ray, even though it's a bit "brighter" overall, can crush out those details and flatten out the blacks a bit. The Blu-ray also has a bit more trouble in rendering the grain. While the UHD's presentation renders it in what appears to be an effortless manner, the Blu-ray's grain can look a bit noisy in some of those darker interiors. Brighter exterior scenes come out looking a bit better.
Still, it's a lovely looking presentation on the whole, and an improvement over the previous Lionsgate Blu-ray.
Audio 8/10
The film is accompanied by a 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD MA. I guess I was expecting something simple mix-wise, maybe the music filling things out and everything else pushed to the fronts, but the audio here is surprisingly rich and immersive. Overall the track is clean and dynamic, with dialogue and music sounding crisp and clear, though that was expected. What ended up being surprising for me is how the film's sound effects have been mixed. The wind, the crashing ocean, the rain, even little creeks and echoes, all of those effects are mixed in an aggressive yet natural manner through the front and rear speakers. Movement sounds natural and clean, and it really places you in the middle of the setting. The film’s music, whether it’s being played within the film itself or as part of the score, is also mixed to move around the viewer. It’s an incredibly effective mix.
Extras 9/10
Criterion ports over some archival material to pair with a few new interviews to create one of the more stacked special editions yet put together for the film. The release starts out with an audio commentary featuring Campion and producer Jan Chapman, recorded in 2006. As a director/producer track it’s probably about what you would expect, effectively covering the film’s production from inception to release and Award wins, but there are a few interesting little details that come out of the conversations between the two that focus especially on the film’s characters and themes. One of the bigger surprises (for me, anyways) from the production side of the discussion was learning about Campion’s resistance to casting Holly Hunter. She thought Hunter was too small and she imagined the character of Ada to be taller, and I assume she felt that would help visually when she’s standing against the male characters in the film. But Hunter had this incredible presence that won her over, and, as a bonus, she could actually play the piano! And quite well, too, at least based on comments from Michael Nyman in another feature.
Campion addresses other things she had to adjust expectations on (she imagined a different type of piano for starters) and talks about a number of fears and anxieties she had while making the film, from working with a big actor like Harvey Keitel to fearing that audiences were going to hate the film. It was also interesting learning about the location scouting and the technical details around the photography and film’s look. It’s worth a listen if one hasn’t done so yet; it’s extremely informative and quite entertaining in and of itself.
The rest of the supplements start things off with a new 27-minute conversation between Campion and critic Amy Taubin. The interview does end up being a bit of a summarization of the commentary, though Campion expands on details around the ending, her debt to Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, and gets a bit more into the character of Baines, who she admits she sees as her ideal man. A discussion on some of the themes present in the film then leads to some of her other work, including her recent The Power of the Dog.
New interviews have also been conducted with production designer Andrew McAlpine (remotely) and director of photography Stuart Dryburgh, running 12-minutes and 10-minutes respectively. McAlpine not only gets into details about building the sets and recreating specific items to fit the time period, even down to the little case Ada keeps her writing paper in, he also talks about how they had to modify the landscape to get the look they wanted, thanks to some locals. Dryburgh talks about the film’s visuals, focusing mostly on the colours and use of filters, which would go from a blue to what he calls a “tobacco” colour. The film’s colour scheme and general appearance was primarily based on a type of colour photography from the period called autochrome, which tended to show a random bias to a particular colour. Some samples are shown here as well, which come from Campion’s and Dryburgh’s research, and they do have a similar look to the film’s, at least in the presentation found on this release.
The best new feature, though, is a 14-minute interview with actor Waihoroi Shortland, who worked as a Maori adviser on the film. Even if the Maori people, as Shortland addresses, were simply an “interesting backdrop” to the film’s central story, Campion wanted to make sure the characters were properly portrayed in the film and Shortland aided in that. He talks about specific cultural details, how a character like Baines would have been treated, and goes over his conversations with Campion. His only real concern was with the sequence around the shadow play, where one of the Maori characters reacts violently to what he was seeing. Shortland initially felt the scene suggested the Maori were “dumb,” though he was fine with it after a discussion with the director. The conversation then goes a little into his acting work and the success of others, particularly the that of director/actor Taika Waititi. An interesting and thoughtful inclusion.
The features then pack in some archival material that first includes an original promotional featurette from 1993 called Inside “The Piano,” featuring interviews with Campion, Chapman, and actors Sam Neill, Harvey Keitel and Holly Hunter. The 15-minute program is typical for what it is but is still worth watching for the interviews with the cast members, who talk about their characters and how they see them. You’ll also find The Piano: 25 Years On, a 31-minute conversation between Campion and Chapman created for a 25th Anniversary Blu-ray edition release by StudioCanal. Filmed around what appears to be some of the film’s locations, the two reflect back on the film and its production and what it means to them a quarter of a century later. They even look a bit more at the film’s central relationship and the obviously complicated nature of it now. Again, some of this is covered in their commentary, but this offers a more current perspective on it, even if just slightly.
We then get some archival interviews, including 18-minutes’ worth of audio excerpts from a 2015 discussion between actor Adam Bowen and the film’s costume designer, Janet Patterson, who covers the influences of the film’s costumes and how they fit with the characters. A 2018 interview between actor Holly Hunter and TCM host Alicia Malone is also here. Recorded for Filmstruck in 2018 for a Jane Campion program that appeared on the short-lived streaming service, Hunter talks about her experiences on the film and working with the director. She recalls how Campion was really resistant to even considering her at first before moving on to the actual production. Interestingly, Hunter had to come up with her own sign-language (which she shared with co-star Anna Paquin) since this would have been common for the period: there was no universal or even national sign language at the time, though she based some of it off what would have been the British signed alphabet. It’s disappointing Criterion couldn’t get a newer interview with her (or any other members of the central cast) but I’m happy they were able to dig this one up. It runs around 23-minutes.
Closing off the interviews is a 2005 one with composer Michael Nyman. I’ll confess that once I saw its running time—a seemingly excessive 50-minutes! —I wasn’t too thrilled about going through it. It is, sadly, entirely a talking-head interview, but much to my surprise it manages to be an immensely engaging and informative conversation. It’s mentioned elsewhere, including the commentary, that the film’s score was written before they had even started filming, which is, to say the least, highly unusual. Campion was able to use this to her advantage when editing, but the reason this was done was because the score would be incorporated into what Ada was playing on the piano, and Hunter would be doing it live on set. Nyman, who has also done scores for Peter Greenaway’s films (and Campion had supposedly told him she didn’t want “any of that Greenaway shit”), talks about the very unorthodox process to writing a score before anything has even been filmed, having to base it all on a script. He also had to work with Hunter on how the pieces needed to be played, though, to his surprise, she picked it up rather quickly and he didn’t have to do that much. Nyman then gets a bit into the longevity of the score and even talks about his disappointment at not winning the Oscar. The length may seem unappealing, but it is a very worthwhile feature to go through, even if film scores don’t particularly interest you.
Closing off the features is the film trailer along with Campion’s 2006 short film The Water Diary, which tells the story of locals dealing with a devastating drought, told entirely through the narration and point of view of a young girl played by Campion’s daughter. The impact of the drought has a wide range of effects, from the obvious scarcity of water for drinking and for crops (and even for cleaning paint brushes) to families having to make tough choices around the livestock or pets they keep. The latter is addressed when the narrator talks about the family having to send her two favourite horses off to somewhere else, though the appearance of a new bike ramp made from two fresh dirt mounds should have probably raised eyebrows. The film then takes an interesting turn once local superstitions come into play, maybe addressing what happens when people become desperate. The film is told in a fragmented manner, consisting of vignettes with the narration guiding us through, not too different from a style Campion has employed before, but goes down a far dreamier direction than some of her other work, at least of what I’ve seen. It’s a great inclusion with the only unfortunate aspect being that the presentation appears to come from a standard-definition source.
The release then comes with an insert featuring a short essay on the film by Carmen Gray, who comments on the film’s story and construction, as well as its longevity. It fills in that academic gap decently enough, but the disc disappointingly lacks material in that department otherwise, outside of some comments from Taubin. Despite that, the material still delves thoroughly through the film’s production and offers a decent enough reflection on the film almost 30-years later.
Closing
The Blu-ray's presentation looks quite good, just limited a bit by the encode. But Criterion has put together the most satisfying special edition for the film yet.
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