Word: campion
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directed by Jane Campion...
Apiano stands alone on an empty swath of New Zealand beach while behind it a towering wall of seawaves threatens to obliterate it. That singularly haunting image is at the core of Jane Campion's new film "The Piano." The hoary proverb which states that a picture is worth a thousand words could not be more appropriate. The value of silence, of nonverbal communication, is essential to the theme of Campion's film, which depicts a world in which images and music count as much as words...
...Piano remedies that. It is set in New Zealand, funded by Francis Bouygues' Ciby 2000 (pronounced, in French, C.B. De Mille), scored by English composer Michael Nyman, and stars some unlikely actors: Georgia's Holly Hunter and Brooklyn's Harvey Keitel join New Zealand's Sam Neill. Campion has also honed her style beyond mannerism; now the desaturated colors and oblique angles bend to serve the story. And a plangent story it is, with a typical Campion heroine: the outsider woman, the renegade from convention, as viewed from a treetop, where only God dares judge...
...Campion has spun a fable as potently romantic as a Bronte tale. But The Piano is also deeply cinematic. It burrows into two essential obsessions of the oldest films: emotion conveyed without words, and the image of a man watching a woman. What is not traditional is that here the women are in charge, as heroine, star and director. The result is that what might have been art-house voyeurism becomes a wise sermon on the various motives for sex. Ada has sex with Stewart out of duty or pity. (The movie sees Stewart's pathos as well...
...early scene Ada comes to the beach and finds her piano in a crate. Opening it, she plays ecstatically; her daughter dances gaily, garlanded in seaweed; and Baines gets a first inkling of the lifeline that art is for Ada. The camera ascends to Campion's favorite bird's-eye view to reveal a huge sea horse magically sculpted from sand and shells. Life, this beautiful image suggests, is a pattern we cannot see, except through the artist's Olympian...