Ada, a mute Irish woman, is sent away along with her young daughter to colonial New Zealand to be married off to an allegedly wealthy landowner. The eponymous piano comes with her, a medium and obsession through which to express what she can't with words. Ada becomes caught up with another man, Baines, who quickly becomes completely besotted with her and ignites the same kind of passion in her that the piano does. Of course that complicates life as a married woman in the Victorian era, the clueless husband invariably discovering what's been going down and being, understandably, none too pleased about it. It is a film about passions, I would say, and being driven mad by them.
The piano serves as a means for Ada to escape a world that does not understand her but it is something of a double-edged sword; she loses herself in it and it seems much perspective with it, forgetting that she exists in a world in which she has no real say. There is a line in the film given by Aunt Morag (a relative of the husband?) which I liked a lot:
"You know, I am thinking of the piano. She does not play the piano like we do, Nessie. No, she is a strange creature. And her playing is strange, like a mood that passes into you. Now, your playing is plain and true, and that is what I like. To have a sound creep inside you is not at all pleasant."
The phenomenon of a sound creeping inside you, a mood that passes into you, is a perfect description of what I love about music and what it is capable of, be it pleasant or not.
I find the sensuality of piano playing fascinating and it's something I've never really seen attributed to another instrument in the same way. The way Ada delicately caresses the piano and the throes of passion that pianists embody in the heat of playing are something striking and I found the peculiar voyeuristic aspect of Baines watching her play far more sensual than the actual physical act of their lovemaking. There's something in the tension of it and, well, I want to use the word purity in the sense that there is an elegance to it that the sloppy and fumbling nature of sex can't capture in the same way.
I'd like to mention another film, Chan-wook Park's Stoker, that approaches the piano similarly. One of my favourite scenes of all time is the following, where subtlety is thrown to the wind but, damn, what a scene:
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