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Clip description
Flora (Anna Paquin) and the Maori children play a sexually suggestive game amongst the trees, watched by the Maori women. Mr Stewart (Sam Neill) stops Flora, telling her never to behave that way. He makes her scrub the trunks, during which Flora tells Mr Stewart a secret: she has discovered why Mr Baines is not progressing in his piano lessons. When Ada and Flora arrive at Baines’s house for their next lesson, they find the Maoris moving the piano. Ada is shocked when Baines tells her he is giving the piano back.
Curator’s notes
There are many barely explained ellipses in the narrative – as there are in other Jane Campion films. This suggestive game with the trees comes without explanation, after we have seen the child peering through a hole at Baines’s house, watching her mother and Baines naked and kissing on the bed. This suggests that the game is Flora’s invention, rather than the Maori children’s – although Stewart seems to think it is their 'heathen’ influence on her. Stewart’s response is beyond curious. She has 'shamed’ the trees, so she must wash their trunks. Whether we are to interpret this as a sign of his deep repression, or the deep sense of shame inculcated in him by culture and religion, is unclear. It is probably a mixture of both, but it adds to the slightly surreal nature of the story.
Campion has always had a strong sense of the surreal in her films, a firm belief that not everything can be explained, nor should be. Human beings are essentially and deeply mysterious in her films. The Piano delves deeper into psychology than the films she made before it. It is certainly not only a film about female psychology either. The actions of the men in the film are given considerable screen time, although they are never as mysterious as the women. Ada is an extraordinarily enigmatic creation, given the fullest dimension by Hunter’s performance. By the end of the film, many mysteries remain about Ada. Campion’s gamble as a storyteller was that audiences – particularly women – would respond to that sense of feminine mystique.
