By Beatrice Loayza
Translator: Issac
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Reverse Shot (June 25, 2021)
Thinking of Jane Campion's Piano Lessons, thoughts inevitably drift to shore. A mother and her children, both wearing hats and puffy skirts, stood like dolls on the seashore, waiting for the sand—empty and smooth sand—to merge with the endless rapids. They are not drifters, but souls in purgatory, whose earthly possessions are scattered around them, like the bulky memories of past lives. Campion empowers these bizarre intertwined women by unearthing their fantasy lives, dreams, and desires, making them flesh and blood.
Piano Lessons (1993)
Ida McGrath (Holly Hunt) was sold to a British immigrant living in the jungles of New Zealand. Ida arrives in a rowboat and is thrown on the beach with her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) like a piece of cargo. Flora spoke, not like someone her age.
Flora occasionally spoke for her silent mother, as if she were a mother, and scolded their entourage for being rude and rude, out of practical, habitual convenience. The confidence and authority gained in speaking on behalf of an adult may be the reason for the girl's hilarious personality. Thus, we see this "new world" not through the eyes of an egotistical, domineering colonizer, but through the eyes of an imaginative, imaginative young man.
However, the film not only has a large number of fascinating images, but also seems to be extracted from the subconscious, but also involves straightforward, perceptible emotions that trigger uncontrollable physical reactions. Halfway through the film, a group of Indigenous men are tricked into jumping up to rescue and sabotaged by the shadow puppet show simulating the murder of a young girl in the play Bluebeard, similar to the myth of the Lumiere brothers' "The Train Comes In," which is said to have panicked and run away from their seats when viewers saw a train speeding toward them.
However, this dubious, racially insensitive scene illuminates Campion's vision, immobilizing her work in a spectacular and emotional film tradition and tying it to a history of magic and hallucination. I think Campion was well aware of the connection between magic and the innocence of the children; in fact, she encouraged this total fantasy immersion.
When I first felt Piano Lessons, I was still very young, and it shed my intellectual armor and made me completely surrender to Campion's fantasies and amazing beauty, crying and falling for it, as if everything had happened directly to me. Campion tells us: It's just a dream, but don't resist being caught up in it.
In her conversation with a local woman, Flora recounts the cause of her mother's aphasia, as if telling an absurd story or a bedtime story about her mother: "The Great Lightning" killed her father, a great German composer, and Ida witnessed such a scene, and was shocked by it, permanently speechless.
Ida glared at her daughter sternly, warning her to be tongue-in-cheek, but her silence retained a crucial ambiguity: Did Flora fabricate their history, or did she reveal Ida's most intimate secrets? In Campion's consideration, both are possible: "Piano Lessons" is a wonderful story that reveals private truths, a confession of love conveyed in the form of a myth.
Depicting women forced to marry men they didn't like was the norm in works like the dramas and literary masterpieces of the times, yet the combination of Ida, plus the arrogant, poor and clumsy Alisdale Stewart played by Sam Neil, impressed me, if not in a deliberately tragic way—though Stewart eventually succumbed to the kind of violence that only the most vicious husband would show.
Alisdale "didn't mind" that Ida was a mute woman, which was not so much a romantic gesture of devotion as a particularly cruel form of indifference. It's one thing to fall in love with a mute girl, to like her silence and take it for granted that she has nothing to say, it's another. However, in Ida's opening voiceover, she dismisses our sympathy: "I don't consider myself silent."
While waiting on the beach for her fiancé to arrive, Ida reached into the small opening of a wooden box containing her cherished piano. Her fingers landed on the keys and played a melody that broke through the calm: it was her expression, her movements, her release. So when Stewart shows up and refuses to drag the bulky piano home, he unknowingly, immediately deprives her of her most precious possession, the musical extension of her own body.
"It's mine, mine," Stewart wrote on a piece of paper when she announced that she was going to sell the piano to neighbor George Baynes (Harvey Kettle). As an "illiterate" with Maori prints on his forehead and the bridge of his nose, Baines traded a coveted piece of land for a piano and listened to Ida play in the name of wanting to learn.
The two men's different understandings of the piano, and Ada's connection to the piano, express a key dichotomy. When the more gentlemanly Stewart sees his new wife pretending to play the piano at the kitchen table, he worries that she suffers from mental illness. Baines, a carefree and rough-headed man (Campion links this to his familiarity with the Aboriginal Maori community), realizes at once how the piano unleashes a powerful and uplifting thing in Ida and how it makes her silence irrelevant.
"She plays the piano differently than we play," commented one chattering neighbor. "She's a strange creature, and she's playing weird." In Campion's view, those on the margins of society—women, children, indigenous peoples—are silent and mysterious to the white men who dominate their lives, in part because these men simply lack imagination; their views are so narrow. This narrow-mindedness of preserving ranks only exacerbated Stewart's embarrassment; though he behaved decently, he looked more like an idiot than his uneducated fellow travelers.
Ida and Baines agreed that for every "piano lesson" at his house, they would get a black key. When the keys were given, Baynes promised to hand over the piano. The arrangement soon evolved into a form of sex trafficking, matching the relationship between Ida and Stuart, who wanted an intimate relationship from the bride he bought.
Baines first looked at Ida's bare shoulders, then threw herself on the floor, enjoying the impact of her pedaling feet, and then gently pressed his fingers on the exposed skin of her socks. These moments are as shaky as the naked caresses and fanatical embraces of this pair of unfaithful men and women who finally confess their love. In one scene, the bare-butt Baynes carefully and reverently wipes Ida's piano as if to say, honey, you're doing a great job.
Campion intersperses these sex scenes with scenes of Flora frolicking in the woods and climbing trees. Both mother and daughter experienced a physical awakening, but Flora—Stuart scolded her for stumbling around the tree—didn't understand how she felt, what she saw through the peephole when she saw Baynes having sex with her mother.
Thanks to the neglected Flora, Stewart also caught the couple's actions, though he secretly watched through a crack in the floor rather than interrupting the enchanting scene. Realizing that Ida is a sexually aroused person, he tries to direct this desire to himself, so he forbids Ida to meet with Baynes and puts her under house arrest.
His efforts were all in vain: Ida carved a love letter to Baynes on the side of the piano keys; to the illiterate Baines, the object itself, a symbol of their passion, was more meaningful than words. But this sentence – dear George, you have my heart. When Flora told Stewart about it, Stewart, enraged with jealousy, cut off one of the fingers of his unfaithful wife with an axe, an act of contemptuous castration.
In this place, Campion not only refuses to sink deeper into the tragedy, but also derails The relationship between Baynes and Ada, thus subverting our expectations. Feeling guilty, Stewart accepts the state in which his marriage was ruined and abandons Ida, ceding it to his rival. So we got back on the beach, back on the rowing boat, toward a blank horizon, toward a new land, a new era—a land we only glimpsed when we saw Ida wearing her newlywed husband's elaborate metal fingers.
Before that, however, Campion evokes one of her most moving images, our heroine throwing the piano off the rocking rowboat, symbolizing rebirth. A rope tied to the piano loosened and wrapped around her feet, and out of a morbid curiosity she deliberately stepped into a ring tied to her leg and threw her into the depths of the sea with the force of an anchor.
For a moment, Ada resigned herself to her fate: "What a terrible death! What a great opportunity! What a surprise!" She said in the voiceover, seemingly amused by the drama of her story, which was as far-fetched and legendary as the legendary lightning bolt that made her dumb. Her "will chooses life", she struggles to get back to the surface, as a local piano teacher, in a loving marriage to achieve her strange and mundane existence, a different fantasy that makes us question the reality of Ida's version of the event.
In the end, however, Campion leaves us with otherworldly, unsettling images: Ada floating above her piano, floating in a grave in the water—not a pleasant one, but extraordinary, a testament to her deep romantic spirit. "I think of my piano at night," she confessed. "There, everything was so quiet that it made me sleepy. It's a weird lullaby, it's true; it's mine."
We must appreciate this fearlessness, and the infrequent prestige and widespread acclaim that works of art with such complexity and potential have won, just as Piano Lesson won the Palme d'Or and then won three Oscars – Hunter, Paquin and Campion as screenwriter.
The power of Piano Lessons is not that the women in it seem to triumph, nor that Ida has found true love, nor because she has escaped from the arrangement of lack of love; but that her inner life—contradictions, ambiguities, and fantasies preserved, even concretized through Campion's unresolved narrative and fantasy tendencies—remains at the heart.