I don't know what made me go back to that tape again. The only time I saw it was ten years ago, and nothing but boredom with rare but vivid flashes of disgust. Scenes of sex seemed too dirty against the background of the base passions that gave rise to them, the life and hardships of immigrants exploring new lands - dull, like any life where there is too much painful physical labor, and entertainment is rare and monotonous. I remember the puddles in which Ada’s feet were drowned, her smeared hem of her dress, the Indians with tattoos on their faces, the prim elderly purses with dull chatter, the stormy sky and the deserted shore, in the middle of which there is a luxurious piano with carved elements, and behind it a thin, little bird woman whose fingers quickly touch the keys, and restless, beautiful music mixes with the noise of waves and the cry of seagulls, and somewhere in the distance there is a whispering forest. No, of course, I don't remember anything like that. More precisely, it all stands before my inner gaze now to the accompaniment of Chopin, and all I managed to take out of the previous viewing is the nasty memories of Baines bidding for every key, his flabby naked body, tinkering in the dirt between Ada and her husband near the stump for picking firewood, “punishment” for infidelity and hatred for a child girl who disobeyed her mother, not realizing the consequences of her act.
Now it all looks very different and is perceived differently, as if I did not watch the Piano at all, but only heard about it. Every movie has its time, its ideal age. At the age of 15, we simply cannot understand and feel what Jane Campion tried to tell us in her tape, what feelings, passions and emotions she tried to show through a gap in the door or wall, what feelings she wanted to share in her very personal, intimate and mature picture, which, without a doubt, needs to grow into. Door to be able to try on the image of Ada for yourself; to accept and carry through the whole plot of her nature, thoughts and impulses; to share the pain, passion, doubts, protest and, sharing fully, with excitement, latent longing and rapid pulse, to admire the beauty of this too realistic and unpretentious story, where the torment of a high soul, captured by circumstances, but ready to adapt and fight for only one hour of illusory freedom in the arms of a man, is most clearly visible. Men, ashamed of their baseness and lack of culture at the confrontation with the pride of a little woman, whose high-turned chin, tightly compressed lips and straight, fearless look beat with a whip, sharp slap. A man who couldn't see her thin fingers in the palms of her legitimate husband. The men who tied her to him only by letting go and showing generosity of which she thought he was incapable. Men, because of which the piano - the main, animated, inseparably connected with the body and spirit of a woman instrument, the continuation of the personality - ceased to be the best friend, sedating fear and giving peace and balance.
Before you is a beautiful, leisurely movie, not embellished with fiction, and therefore purely European, unsweetened and frank. Beautiful with its inner lining, its inner innermost innermost, which is both invisible and egregiously naked, is not audible like Ada’s voice, and deafening like a cry of acute pain. This film, in which the sounds of the piano replace human speech, conveying the complex range of feelings of the heroine, is torn by its piercing silence and complex in its original simplification, because the plot itself is conveyed in three words: two men and one woman. Unloved husband and desirable lover, the path to which is so exciting with its contradictions and internal struggle. However, Campion managed to bring complexity and wealth where, it would seem, they are not a place where life is simple, and people are discultured and wild because of the eternal struggle for survival and the hardships of life. Life that leaves no room for semitones, ambiguity and prolonged pauses.
The delightful sounds of the piano, relationships that began with animal, instinctive passion, but grew into self-denial, the strongest emotional intensity in combination with the rarest sonorous acting performance and competent, “female”, close to the details of the director made the painting “Pianino” a refined, strong, completed melodrama that cannot but find a response in the soul of an adult, sensitive person.
Bottom line: sweeping, deep, layered cinema under a modest, tightly buttoned cloak of unassuming realism. Passion and struggle in this tape you feel the skin, as well as the music of an alarmed, swept away soul, simultaneously submissive and obstinate.
10 out of 10