He rises, and standing before the instrument, undresses.

Campion shows Baines lying on his bed gazing with yearning at the piano after Ada has gone. An instance of this erotic dynamic unfolds early in the film, after one of Baines’ first piano ‘lessons’. At times the camera sits so close to skin it appears to stroke it. Through close ups and lyrical camera movements, Campion creates a sensory, sensual world. Touch is also vital to The Piano’s physical textures and narrative currents. It is a concern that Campion has returned to throughout her career, most notably in the films Holy Smoke! (1999) and In the Cut (2003). In particular, the economy of touch between Ada and Baines explores how sexual desire between women and men is a bargain in which power relations are repeatedly renegotiated over shifting ground. Ada, Baines, and Stewart each engage with touch in different ways. The Piano turns on the complexity of meanings associated with touch – desire, control, liberation, risk, power, pleasure, and violence. He wants to get close to Ada, and realises early that the piano will allow him to do so. George Baines (Harvey Keitel), an Englishman turned ‘native,’ bargains with Stewart for the piano, exchanging it for land. Later, at Stewart’s house, Ada looks out the window with the same longing. Campion positions her atop a cliff, looking down at the instrument. Campion narrows her focus onto Ada’s fingers entering the dark, intimate space and caressing the keys.Īda’s yearning is magnified when the piano is left behind on the beach.

On the beach, as she and daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) wait for her new husband Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill) to retrieve them, Ada removes some of the piano’s packing material, like she’s unbuttoning a shirt. She touches the piano like a lover, with tenderness, recognition, and the thrill of discovery. Ada’s piano is also an object suffused with her repressed desire, articulated through Michael Nyman’s rapturous compositions. Campion gives us access to mute Ada McGrath’s (Holly Hunter) voice when her fingers touch her beloved piano, which has travelled all the way from Scotland to New Zealand with her. In The Piano (1993), Jane Campion’s gorgeous, Gothic romance, it speaks multiple dialects.

The piano film jane campion