THE PIANO

THE PIANO (Directed by Jane Campion. Starring Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill)

Accents are frequently a problem in international co-productions, when American stars are drafted in for inappropriate parts to buoy up the movie's chances at the box office. Holly Hunter has no problems, however, in her virtuoso performance as Ada, a Victorian Scotswoman arriving in New Zealand as Sam Neill's mail order bride.

Since her character is mute, we are spared any embarrassing transatlantic inflections. Instead, the camera pays close attention as Holly's face registers every subtle nuance of feeling and thought. She does more with less than even Clint Eastwood: with a face like this, who needs dialogue?

With a mute at its centre and a wilderness as its setting, it is hardly surprising that there is an absolutely minimal amount of spoken dialogue in The Piano. Don't expect a silent movie, however, for with a trio of star performances and her eclectic but always inspired camerawork, editing and design, director Jane Campion makes the silence so intense as to appear noisy. Her pauses are not so much pregnant as overloaded, occasionally symphonic. And there is music of course: Michael Nyman's beautiful score and Ada's beloved piano.

Campion, whose feature debut Sweetie and follow-up Angel at my Table established her reputation for the unusual, has come up with a plot that at first sight might appear ripe for the twilight zone: just your average girl loves piano, girl loses piano, girl sells body to win piano back story. With a twist. The twist is the remorseless logic with which this unlikely melodrama unfolds. As Ada's affections transfer from the inanimatre to the animate, we are swept along with her, never doubting her course of action.

Of course, I know a few women who wouldn't mind being Sam Neill's mail order bride, and would swap a date with him for an evening at the piano any day. But curiously it is not Neill, in straightlaced and hopelessly repressed mode, who inspires the transformation in Ada. Instead love is evoked by the brooding visage of Harvey Keitel, transplanted from the mean streets of New York to make an unlikely Romeo.

There is so much doubt and pain in Keitel that he has rarely, if ever, been called on to play a straight romantic lead. Even here, at his most appealing, his romance starts as a form of blackmail and takes place in the treacherous world of adultery. Yet just as the film awakens Ada to herself, so this chance to play a nice guy brings out new qualities of lightness in Keitel's always compulsive performance.

Although a period piece, this exudes the dark gothic strangeness of, say, Charlotte Bronte rather than the usual polite romanticism of Merchant Ivory. The incongruity of the formal Victorians in the almost primeval setting of New Zealand evokes tones of contradiction and irony in almost every shot. Yet there is also sensuality and compassion here. The Piano is a deeply erotic, maturely adult love story, in which Campion makes no attempt to modernise the repressive Victorian attitude to sex but instead draws on it for some intensely arousing imagery. Keitel's finger probing a hole in Hunter's stocking appeals to instincts a lot more profound than the base ones inspired by most of Hollywood's designer sex.

Beneath this bizarre but somehow credible tale of repression and adultery lurks a parable of feminism. Ada's muteness is a sign of her complete lack of power in this man's world. Her empowerment comes through a mutual unleashing of passion that does as much to free her male lover as herself, but the terrifying retribution of the male world is never far away. When the beating comes, while blow for blow it could not match the beating of the heroine in True Romance, it leaves its audience far more emotionally devastated.

The Piano is a film where the romance really does ring true. Campion, shaping up as one of the world's great directors, matches her scriptwriting skills with inspired film-making in a genuinely lyrical piece that never strikes a wrong note.