Screen Scene
SCREEN SCENE
By John Carlos Cantu
THE PIANO
[1993. Directed by Jane Campion. Cast: Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill. English and Maori with English subtitles. Miramax Films. 126 mins.]
Where many films tell too much, "The Piano" merely suggests. Where many films stun with a senseless explosion, "The Piano" mysteriously lulls.
Where many films stridently shout, "The Piano" gracefully sings. A film of lyrical sensitivity, "The Piano" alternates interludes of undulating passion with vivid flashes of violence that are as ultimately hypnotic as they are aphrodisiac.
A unique film in many regards, "The Piano" sits paradoxically at the crossroads of modern cinema, its enraptured sensibilities carry the story beyond the traditional syntax of conventional narration, without falling insensibly into the didactic semiotics of post-modernism.
What Jane Campion has gloriously achieved in this masterwork is a feminist vocabulary which has the dramatic power of anything previously produced in film, while also expanding the sheer emotional range of the visual image itself.
A simple tale of a mute Scottish immigrant's deliverance into an arranged marriage, "The Piano" slowly introduces its audience to a lustily overheated underworld where the exotic fauna breeds passion even as it alienates the straight-laced English settlers who have come to colonialize the kingdom of the Maori.
Crucial to Campion's design is Holly Hunter as the repressed Ada whose paradoxical blossoming comes at the hands of her brutish neighbor, Baines, a deeply sensitive man-child who in the parlance of the time would be said to have "gone native."
Wagering an unsteady exchange of land for the piano from his fellow settler (and Ada's arranged husband),Stewart, Baines offers to return the instrument callously left on the beach to the desperate Ada only if she'll barter herself for its ivories...one key at a time. What then begins as a reluctant compromise soon develops into the love of a lifetime as these illicit romantics find themselves just as surely drawn to one other as each finds the piano a mean towards their end.
This description, of course, in no way conveys the power of Campion's vivid imagination. Through the filmmaker's tool kit, she proceeds to enlarge the scope of her intimate tale to gothic proportions while avoiding the tendency towards overt melodrama that has foiled similar tales in the past. By merely tracing the slimmest outline of her narrative, Campion relies on her audience to find its way through the film.
As a result, "The Piano" becomes as much a visceral experience as it is a cinematic expression. Images of New Zealand's shoreline and brushy interior begin to take on suggestive qualities. Indeed, even the slightest shift of Hunter's silent expressions begins to speak volumes about the human condition.
Campion is, in a primal sense, working keenly upon our collective understanding of such totems as love, loyalty, and sensual abandon, with as sure a hand as has any film creator in the history of the medium. Yet her equally rapturous femininity has created an expressiveness that subtly envelops her audience into her unique perspective.
A HARD DAY'S NIGHT
[1964. Directed by Richard Lester. Cast: John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Wilfrid Brambell. United Artists Films MPI Video. 90 mins.]
Could it really be three decades since mop-topped Beatlemania invaded America with a flash and fury that not only surpassed Pelvis in style, but also musical supremacy?
Richard Lester's finest directorial work has always stood at the head of the "rock movie" genre because it avoided all of the clichés that have riddled other rock-oriented films - before and after. But let's not confuse art with artfulness, for "A Hard Day's Night" was a cold-eyed proposition to cash in on the British Invasion. The movie therefore represents a sort of swinging '60s Imperialism in reverse.
Still, even the hard-boiled financiers (on both sides of the Atlantic) that cooked up this pastiche of new wave jump-cutting, new-fangled rocking'n'rolling, and heavily fictionalized autobiography, weren't prepared to cope with the fact that these four lads were so talented they could get away with just about whatever they wanted and still manage to pull off the show.
Not that we're as innocent as we were 30 years ago.
We now know Lennon was sulking about "selling out" through the entire shoot (which is why he periodically disappears in the film); McCartney was scheming their next career move (which is why he periodically disappears in the film); Ringo wasn't taking anything too seriously (which is why he's still a joy to look at 30 calendars later); but Harrison was taking everything all-too seriously (which is why he's paralyzed with a wincing twitch through the whole film). No matter that the silly sub-plot concerning Paul's bounder of a "very clean" grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell) is now obviously the centerpiece of the film because at least Brambell could act - in contrast to the unashamed mugging the Fab Four indulged in. And mostly, no matter because the film's soundtrack is as sturdy as...well, a rock.
Containing many of Lennon's finest compositions, a couple of healthy efforts by McCartney, and the typical dead-on one-shots by Harrison and Starr, in some ways this film is the high point of the Beatles' careers. It was certainly fun (for us) while it lasted.
RATING KEY
Acting
Cinematography
Direction
Editing
Narrative
Sound
Special Effects
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