When an arranged marriage brings Ada (Holly Hunter) and her spirited daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) to the wilderness of 19th-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband Alisdair (Sam Neill) and a rugged frontiersman George (Harvey Keitel) to whom she develops a forbidden attraction. Jane Campion made history when she became the first woman to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for THE PIANO in 1993. With a sweeping, haunting score and gorgeous, moody cinematography, THE PIANO has endured as a timeless exploration of repression, intimacy, and desire.
The new 4K restoration was supervised, color-graded, and approved by Jane Campion and her director of photography, Stuart Dryburgh using a 35mm print from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as reference with assistance from Fixafilm Australia with 5.1 audio mix remastered from the original 24-track digital.
“THE PIANO plays itself with such contrapuntal richness, it resonates in you forever…. An extraordinary symphony of sounds and silence, of lilting pleasure and tangled horror.” —Desson Howe, Washington Post (Nov 19, 1993) “Prepare for something very special…. The film looks deceptively small, but in character it's big and strong and complex. Here's a severely beautiful, mysterious movie that, as if by magic, liberates the romantic imagination…. [Jane Campion] takes the breath away not by conventionally spectacular effects, but by the simple audacity of her choices about where to put the camera and what to show.” —Vincent Canby, New York Times (Oct 16, 1993) “As peculiar and haunting as any film I’ve seen…. It is one of those rare movies that is not just about a story, or some characters, but about a whole universe of feeling — of how people can be shut off from each other, lonely and afraid, about how help can come from unexpected sources, and about how you’ll never know if you never ask.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Nov 19, 1993) “More than three decades later, THE PIANO remains one of Campion’s signature works: a spare, sensual, and psychologically precise period drama where silence, music, landscape, and desire carry as much dramatic weight as dialogue. Its restoration arrives after a broader reconsideration of Campion’s career following THE POWER OF THE DOG, but THE PIANO has long stood on its own as a landmark of female authorship, international cinema, and 1990s arthouse crossover success.” —Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist
