Going to Baines’s cabin every day to play her music, Ada is pulled into a weirdly passionate relationship with the illiterate Baines, himself an enigma who has tattooed his face like the local Maori natives. When the probably virginal Stewart, who hasn’t consummated his marriage, discovers the liaison, Gothic violence explodes in the New Zealand bush.
Watching “The Piano,” you are led from surprise to surprise, like a child hearing a fairy tale for the first time. And like a fairy tale, the film seems both dreamlike and absolutely real, a fusion that is Campion’s rare talent. She is not a programmatic feminist but a poetic one. Hers is a strong, deeply erotic poetry that puts the woman in the driver’s seat: Ada’s journey to her sexual center entails the discovery of her true voice. Campion has the un-Hollywood guts to know that you can’t show love without the mutual nudity of lovers: Hunter and Keitel are daring in the quiet power of these scenes that are like a startling fusion of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.
These scenes even have a fine wit as Ada dispenses with the complicated clothing that symbolizes Victorian repression. Hunter is a revelation, magically expressive and startlingly beautiful. Campion, a superb inspirer of actors, gets levels that Keitel and Neill have never reached, and little Anna Paquin touches depths far beyond the grasp of Macaulay (Kid Millions) Culkin. This film has the kind of originality that shocks.
