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Alone in their bedroom, Ada (Holly Hunter) tells her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) a story about her real father. When Stewart (Sam Neill) comes to ask if he can kiss them goodnight, Ada makes clear she does not welcome it. Later, in Baines’s house, Ada is shocked when Baines (Harvey Keitel) kisses her neck while she is playing the piano. Baines proposes a bargain – a way to get her piano back. Ada doesn’t take long to re-negotiate his offer.
Curator’s notes
The Piano is partly a story about power, of course. Ada is ostensibly a person with very little power – but that’s not quite true, as we see in this scene in which she withholds affection from Stewart – to whom she’s married – and trades her physical self to meet Baines’s desires for her own goals. Stewart pays in loneliness for stealing her piano and selling it to Baines. Baines paid for it with land he 'obtained’ from the Maori. In both cases, the rights of ownership are contestable.
There’s a distinction made here also between the physical self and the emotional self. We see the latter in the way Ada tells the story to her daughter, with a kind of poetic, ecstatic expression of her private self. That same expression comes to her when she plays the piano. Her physical self may be traded – in marriage or a bargain – but not her inner spiritual self – at least not to a man of no sensitivity such as Stewart. Initially, she will not give Baines anything of her inner self either, although she responds to his directness. He at least concedes that she has some power in the relationship.
