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.
Technical Specifications
Supplements
- Audio commentary featuring Jane Campion and producer Jan Chapman
- New conversation between Jane Campion and film critic Amy Taubin
- New interviews with Stuart Dryburgh, production designer Andrew McAlpine, and Maori adviser Waihoroi Shortland
- Interview with actor Holly Hunter on working with Campion
- “The Piano” at 25, a program featuring a conversation between Jane Campion and producer Jan Chapman
- Interview with composer Michael Nyman
- Excerpts from an interview with costume designer Janet Patterson
- Inside “The Piano,” a featurette including interviews with actors Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel and Sam Neill
- Water Diary, a 2006 short film by Campion
- Trailer
- An essay by critic Carmen Gray