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The Piano - The Eroticism of Touch and Silence
Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano is billed by Rotten Tomatoes as “a truth-seeking romance played in the key of erotic passion". But anyone expecting a musical bodice ripper will be disappointed. The film is powerfully and hauntingly erotic, but not as you might expect. Portraying male sexuality through Campion’s “female gaze”, it demonstrates how male eroticism does not have to rely on assertion and power. Tenderness and vulnerability can co-exist with strength and potency as effective forms of masculine sexual expression.
Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) is landed on a New Zealand beach with her young daughter sometime in the late nineteenth century. She has been unwillingly packed off from Scotland by her father to marry Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill), a conventional, buttoned-up pioneer who is busy clearing the land of trees and Maori. Ada is a mystery. She has been mute since the age of 6, apparently of her own choice. Her black crinoline suggests widowhood. But her child’s dead father is never described as her husband. Despite her fiercely independent spirit, she is powerless, semi-outcast, and subjugated to men; with no voice and no power to refuse a union half a world away with an unknown man in whom she has no interest. But she finds emotional self-expression through her precious piano, landed with difficulty on the empty beach. When Stewart turns up next day, disappointed at the “stunted” wife he is meeting for the first time, he decides to leave the piano behind, rejecting his new wife’s voice and emotional connection.
But in charge of Stewart’s Maori porters is George Baines (Harvey Keitel), a tough guy with half-finished facial tattoos who lives on the fringes of the European community. He prefers the Maori to the imitation of Victorian England that Stewart and others are trying to build amid the muddy, dying rainforest. More liberated, emotionally attuned, and in touch with the Maori’s overtly sexual culture, Baines sees a tired woman on the beach rather than a shop-soiled chattel.
The piano remains marooned in the Pacific surf until Ada persuades Baines to take her back to the beach and move the instrument to the Stewart homestead. Baines is entranced by Ada’s expressive and intimate playing of the piano, with her daughter dancing and cartwheeling exuberantly across the sand. Baines desires Ada and, understanding the importance of the piano, buys it from Stewart for 80 acres of land along with an agreement that Ada will give him lessons. For the second time Ada and her piano are sold by men.
On face value, it’s a crude deal. Baines has no interest in learning to play; he wants to listen to and touch Ada. In private he negotiates with her to remove items of her clothes and to allow him to touch her. In exchange she will earn back her own piano, one key at a time. So begins the erotically charged negotiation between the mute Ada and the laconic Baines.
When Baines first touches Ada, he is predictably assertive, grabbing her neck to kiss her. The tension between his rough hand and Ada’s delicate neck is disquieting. Ada jumps. Baines withdraws; suddenly understanding that force will interrupt the music that is her voice. But the sexual frisson is established. At their next lesson, rather than be forceful and interrupt her music, he lies under the piano and gently touches Ada’s skin through a small hole in her black stockings. The screen is filled with Baines’ finger on this tiny patch of skin and then shifts to Ada’s point of view, as she falters over the notes.
When Ada has gone Baines lies on his bed gazing with yearning at the piano. He rises, stands before the instrument, and undresses. Naked, Baines wipes the piano with his undershirt then touches it with his hand, placing his skin where Ada’s has been before it. At this point, it is as if Baines wants to be the piano, to be the receiver of Ada’s touch, to be played upon. Desire renders him both active and passive. Men are rarely depicted in so vulnerable a way in cinema. Keitel is eroticised for the female spectator – this is male beauty through the female gaze.
As their sexual exchanges escalate, Baines discards his male power by shedding his clothes. When he first displays himself naked to Ada he emerges from behind a curtain as a soft, vulnerable body to be looked at, not as a sexual aggressor. Campion feminizes Baines, reminding us that what he desires above all else is for Ada to desire him.
In contrast, it is Ada who gains power by pretending to care nothing for Baines. She grows skilled at negotiating her own terms within the bargain, determining the quantity of keys Baines must give her for every interaction between them. Baines now fears their desire will never be mutual, understanding the corrupting nature of touch when not willingly reciprocated: “The arrangement,” he says, “is making you a whore and me wretched”. He decides to release Ada and gives her the piano unconditionally. Campion then gives Ada the final decision. With a free choice over her sexuality, Ada returns to Baines. Rather than wrapping her in a cliched embrace, Baines falls to his knees, diving beneath her black hooped skirt to give her oral pleasure. He fulfills her needs first.
Ada is mute throughout this mutual seduction, and Baines says no more than he needs to. Touch, silence and the music of the piano are the love language between Ada and Baines, skillfully supported by Michael Nyman’s soundtrack.
So what does Campion’s depiction of Ada and Baines communicate about sex? And what can men in particular take from its representation?
We live in a more equal world than these imagined Victorians, but sexual desire between women and men remains a bargain in which power relations are repeatedly renegotiated over shifting ground. Baines begins by buying Ada’s piano and using the lessons to buy sexual favours, but soon realises he cannot just take her. He has to make her want him. He does so by touching her gently, by revealing his naked self. He doesn’t try and talk her into bed. Rather he uses touch; a language they can share. When his grab for a kiss goes nowhere, he realises he has to touch her gently and draw her to him.
He wants to see her naked, but rather than rip off her clothes he takes his off to show himself, using his naked body to make her want him. This is a reversal of the common expectation that it is women who entice men. Finally, when she continues to resist, he is ready to let her go unless the feeling is mutual. With their relations set more equally, Ada allows herself to desire him.
It is the skillful use of use of silence and touch that gives this film its erotic power, demonstrating that when it comes to seduction, what you do and how you do it is often more important than what you say. Men can get what they want sexually by being gentle, subtle, open and vulnerable as well as being forceful. And men should never forget that, despite the flood of images telling us otherwise, the world is not just seen through a male gaze. We might not all have an arse as tight as Harvey Keitel’s, but it’s important to remember that women can desire our naked bodies and want to touch them as we do their’s.
For a fuller review of this amazing film, I recommend Joanna Di Mattia’s excellent 2017 review The Heart Asks Pleasure First: Economies of Touch and Desire in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) – Senses of Cinema from which this post draws.