The Piano (1993)

directed by Jane Campion

Helen Alston

2017 marked the 70th anniversary of the Cannes International Film Festival. It’s a much-photographed occasion and its most shared photo was, at first glance, fairly boring to behold: a sea of starched black fabric and white faces on a red carpet, the assembled living directors who have won Cannes’ coveted Palme d’Or. In the center of the photo is Jane Campion, in a sheer black top and transition lenses, the only woman director who has ever won the festival’s most prestigious award.

Campion wears the burden of representation lightly. Where her male counterparts look stiff and out of place, she has her arms around her fellow winners, holding an easy smile and a pose. She helmed the Cannes jury back in 2014 and was just as comfortable then speaking out about the “inherent sexism in the industry” (IndieWire).

“Time and time again we don’t get our share of representation. Excuse me, gentlemen, but the guys seem to eat all the cake.” Nine people serve on the Cannes jury; for the first time in 2014, with Campion at the helm, women barely outnumbered men five to four. Film journalists at the time openly speculated (Deadline) about whether this particular makeup of jurors might be uniquely inclined to select one of that year’s two films directed by women for the Palme d’Or.

“We are coming from different points of view but we can vote with our hearts and conscience for what we love the most,” said Campion. “Maybe there will be a consensus or maybe we will have to discover a consensus. But we are not obliged to do anything. I think that would be a really ugly situation.” The insistence that a group of women, given the power to do so, might fail to be dispassionate in awarding the Palme d’Or is male fragility in full and glorious display—and it falls to the woman in charge to explain that, yes, they do in fact plan to follow Cannes’ guidelines for how to land on a winner. The palpable anxiety around Campion’s barely-but-mostly-women panel abated when the group eventually chose Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (2014) to win the big prize. 

Film and television establishments expect women to favor stories about women. After decades of being underrepresented in every aspect of culture, of course a panel of women will choose the woman’s film to win. It follows that a woman auteur should celebrate women in her work. Unlike her Cannes jury, Jane Campion’s career does fit those narrow expectations: most of her biggest films, among them Sweetie (1989), The Piano (1993), and Bright Star (2009), all center around women. Still, as Campion likes to say, she is “not obliged to do anything,” in any aspect of her career. For Campion, celebrating women looks like telling stories about women who are difficult, often selfish, and unapologetic.

“Hero stories are wearing thin,” she says in an interview with The Guardian’s Kate Muir.  “We have lived a male life, we have lived within the patriarchy. It’s something else to take ownership of your own story.”

The Piano (1993)—Campion’s most critically recognized film, which won the Palme d’Or—maps a complicated woman’s emotional landscape. It tells the story of Ada (played by Holly Hunter), a Scottish woman who chose at a young age to become mute. She communicates through her daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), by writing in a little notebook she wears around her neck, and by playing her piano. The film begins with the camera fully submerged underwater, with a monologue in Ada’s inner voice running over. When we come up above the waves, Ada and her daughter are hauled ashore by the crew of the ship they sailed on and deposited on the beach along with their belongings. Ada’s father has shipped her small family all the way to the New Zealand bush to join her future husband, an English colonist named Stewart (Sam Neill), whom she has never met.

In the face of such vastness—the darkness coming, the forest before them and the ocean behind, with no knowledge of when the other colonists will find them—Ada turns inward. In the space of a cut, Ada and Flora are cozy inside a hoop skirt and petticoat, sheltered from the wind and the water. In the morning, the tide comes in and Stewart arrives. He brings a group of Maori men and women and one of his neighbors, Baines (Harvey Keitel), to help haul their belongings into the village, though they leave behind her beloved piano.

Campion spoke to Roger Ebert after the initial release of The Piano about choosing Holly Hunter to play Ada."Well, at first, it wasn't an obvious choice," she said. "I met a lot of women I think could have done interesting things, but Holly has a kind of interior world. Actually, not a big interior world, not like you'd say was a universe, but a very definite one. In this role, she has to communicate with her eyes, her empathy and her vulnerability. And Ada, the character, can be very chilly."

Hunter’s Ada is severe and stubborn. Her face is a moon eclipsed by her dark bonnet, her eyes proud and fierce. She deals in absolutes: Stewart must bring the piano up to their house. Flora must tell everyone what Ada means when she signs. Both her husband, Stewart, and her love interest, Baines, must only touch her as much as she wishes to be touched, or not at all. Her moral compass is strong but it turns toward her own true north, as demonstrated by the child she has out of wedlock and her willingness to follow her heart rather than her obligation to her spouse. In Ada’s silence, there is no justification for her behavior, only her physicality and the music from the piano. She faces a violent society’s punishment for not conducting herself according to society’s rules at the hands of her husband, yet hers is ultimately a love story.

This is not a film that celebrates all women: the Maori ladies who work for the colonists are written as sheer parody, their freedom and laughter are a childlike contrast to the tightly-laced seriousness of the colonial women. We never see the Maori women in Maori spaces, only in the homes of white people and on the beach, playing with top hats and hoop skirts. The production of Bluebeard that the colonists put on takes an interesting turn when a few of the Maori men take the play—in which the eponymous Bluebeard beheads his wives—literally and need to be introduced to the living actresses to prove it was a farce. Certainly, the indignation of the Maori characters sheds light on the ridiculousness of the English obsession with violence, but the joke turns on the perceived ignorance of the native population.

In the final beat of the film, when Ada, Baines, and Flora set off to sea to start a life together, Ada insists that the piano go overboard. “She says it’s spoiled!” Flora shouts over the noise of the water. In the split second that Baines and the Maori rowers manage to tip the piano overboard, Ada slips her foot through a loop of rope and finds herself in the ocean, a willful act that, if she died, would orphan her daughter. Her heavy dress and hoop skirt invert from the force with which Ada is being dragged down by the piano. She looks placidly at the water for a few moments before she decides to struggle and free herself from the rope.

“What a surprise,” her inner voice narrates. “My will has chosen life.”

The 2018 Cannes Film Festival marked twenty five years since The Piano’s release. Cate Blanchett helmed both the 2018 Cannes jury and a protest with eighty one other women (USA Today) highlighting the inherent sexism in the film industry. Only eighty two films made by women have ever contended for prizes at Cannes; the other 1,688 of the films submitted in the sixty eight year history of the award were made by men.

"Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of our industry says otherwise," said Blanchett and Agnés Varda, the only woman who has ever won an honorary Palme d’Or for her work in film. The Japanese film Shoplifters, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, ended up winning the 2018 Palme d’Or, leaving Campion the lone woman on the podium for yet another year.

In May 2018, the same month as Cannes, Campion shared her feelings about #metoo with film critic Kate Muir. “Right now, we’re in a really special moment. I’m so excited about it. It’s like the Berlin wall coming down, like the end of apartheid. I think we have lived in one of the more ferocious patriarchal periods of our time, the ‘80s, ‘90s and noughties. Capitalism is such a macho force. I felt run over.”

Yet, Campion is used to being one of the only women in the room—she has been so at Cannes for twenty five years. She has found success within the patriarchal establishment: though many of her films in the nineties and noughties did not receive widespread acclaim or splashy box office landings, her work remains well-reviewed critically. Campion describes the process of working on her most recent project, a TV show called Top of the Lake (2013 and 2017), as “...I just do what I want, and weirdly people love it.”

The 2020 Cannes festival was effectively canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic; Jane Campion remains the only woman to have won the Palme d'Or. For Campion, her struggle is in the past tense; for other women in film, the work continues apace.

Helen Alston is a writer and avid dog hugger local to Charlottesville, VA. She holds a degree from the University of Mary Washington. The rest of her life is forthcoming.