the piano film essay

Jotted Lines

A Collection Of Essays

The Piano (1993 Movie): Summary, Analysis

Summary: .

It is the mid-nineteenth century. Ada is a mute who has a young daughter, Flora. In an arranged marriage she leaves her native Scotland accompanied by her daughter and her beloved piano. Life in the rugged forests of New Zealand’s South Island is not all she may have imagined and nor is her relationship with her new husband Stewart. She suffers torment and loss when Stewart sells her piano to a neighbour, George. Ada learns from George that she may earn back her piano by giving him piano lessons, but only with certain other conditions attached. At first Ada despises George but slowly their relationship is transformed and this propels them into a dire situation. 

The Piano is a Gothic costume-romance about the language of love, desire and the paradox of self-determining female agency. At a time when women’s positions in society were defined by patriarchal repression, the arranged marriage of Ada (Holly Hunter) to the middle-class Stewart (Sam Neill) who is colonising the unrelenting New Zealand bush, offers her and her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) little choice over their future. Ada’s voice-over is a Scottish child’s – maybe Flora’s – narrating her apprehension over the forthcoming journey. However, visually we discover her self-appointed autonomy and resistance to female positions through her defiant muteness from the age of six, via her gestures, sign language, written notes and translations through her daughter. Ada’s expressions of emotion and desire are also articulated through music as we see her lost in the ecstasy of playing her piano. It is a rare moment of unselfconscious joy in the film, halted by an intrusive servant. 

Cinematically framed to mirror and conspire with each other, Ada and Flora, in their restrictive dark Victorian bonnets and hooped skirts, struggle to negotiate the landing, the boat and the ruthless waves when they arrive in New Zealand, as rough sailors deliver them unceremoniously onto an empty, white and hostile beach. All the trappings of Victorian Scotland, symbolised by Ada’s household items of luggage, lie like abandoned anomalies on an ancient shore. But even more difficult is the unloading of Ada’s prized possession – the piano; symbol of Western civilisation in an uncultivated land, it stands in its wooden crating against the oncoming tide, waiting like Ada, to be unpacked, touched and resound with its own emotional tones. 

Michael Nyman’s music in The Piano very much defines Ada’s character. Impressed with Nyman’s minimalist scores for Peter Greenaway’s films, Campion had requested a romantic, lyrical, poetic and conservative piece of expressive music for her film. Nyman was inspired by nineteenth-century Scottish ballads and Mendelsohn’s songs without words and composed ahead of shooting, in collaboration with Campion’s script, unlike contemporary scores which are added in post-production. When Holly Hunter was finally cast, Nyman then levelled his score to match her highly competent musical ability. This allowed Holly Hunter to invest Ada, as a nineteenth-century composer, with her own emotional commitment through the music, and intervene further in the character creation. 

Claudia Gorbman notes that the ‘authenticity gained in this process’ (in Margolis 2000: 47) owes much to this personalised approach as, rather than presenting Ada as just a skilful or professional player of a nineteenth-century musical repertoire, Ada produces the music from her own being as a composer and female artist with an inner language beyond the spoken word. This allows the music to move beyond its usual illustrative function in classical cinema, to express her more ambiguous subjectivity and emotional language, as seen in her playing of her piano in the film, although this goes unrecognised by her new husband Alasdair Stewart. 

So in a muddied, restrictive suit, formal top hat and showing Victorian discomfort at finding Ada and Flora sheltering under the hoops of women’s undergarments on the New Zealand beach, when her husband meets them, he pragmatically decides to leave the piano behind, and unwittingly rejects his new wife’s voice and emotional connection. It is rather Baines (Harvey Keitel), more emotionally attuned and liberated by Maori culture, who she stubbornly persuades to take her back to the beach. Her expressive and intimate playing of the piano, with Flora dancing and cartwheeling exuberantly across the sand, then entrances Baines who has clearly never seen women behave with such wild abandon. 

He thus begins the erotically charged negotiations for the piano and Ada; he offers 80 acres of land to Stewart for the piano and then he and the Maori’s transport it through the all-consuming mud and bush to his house. Ignoring again Ada’s ownership of the piano, Stewart insists Ada gives Baines lessons. But in reality Baines only wants to listen and touch Ada, and in private negotiates with her to remove items of her clothes and permission for him to touch her, in exchange for the piano. 

It’s a fragile bargain which ostensibly positions Ada as passive victim of male power, prostituting herself for the sale of individual keys. But Jane Campion inverts the liaison to reveal more subtle tones of female/male desire. Ada’s rejection of Baines’ advances – halting the music in protest of his physical invasions of her personal space, reluctantly removing her clothes, lying rigidly on the bed with him – demonstrate female resistance to patriarchal control even as he takes advantage of her position. 

These scenes also simultaneously unfold a reluctant awakening of Ada’s sensual desire, reiterated in the mise en scéne and the cinematography. The building up of the rare soft-focus amber glow, a palette specifically reserved for intimate moments in the film, contrasts with the predominantly suffocating sea tones of the inhospitable bush in which ‘The air seems green as at the bottom of a deep sea’ (Campion 1993: 17). The framing, positioning and cutting between Ada and Baines, also offers both the male and female perspectives of erotic desire, resulting in a levelling of gender power. 

In Visual Pleasure and the Cinema, Mulvey demonstrated that the look of the camera in classical Hollywood cinema privileges a voyeuristic gaze positioning the woman as object of male desire. But Stella Bruzzi, in Desire and the Costume Film, demonstrates Campion’s progressive, feminist inversion of Mulvey’s theory. While costume can function as a fetish for male desire, Baines’ removal of his clothes alongside Ada’s is a vestimentary performance of parity, and a cinematic offer of sensual pleasure in the male/female body. And while the scene of Baines naked and alone as he dusts and caresses the piano, could be seen as perversely festishistic, it reveals unusually, under Campion’s sensitive direction and softened amber lighting, a sensual vulnerability through the eroticising of the male protagonist for a female spectator. Like Marvell’s poem of courtship in To His Coy Mistress, in the conclusion of this cinematic ritual, Campion awards the final decision to the woman. So when Baines believes the desire is non-mutual he releases Ada and gives her the piano unconditionally. Once given true free will over her sexuality, Ada returns inexorably to Baines to consummate the relationship. 

Peter Brooks notes that nineteenth-century melodrama is defined by its polarised moral codes in which good and evil battle against each other for the ultimate triumph of virtue. Its conflict is symptomatic of a spiritual demise in nineteenth-century culture and the imposing of moral meaning on a familial structure. Hence women, wives, mothers were idealised as the moral locus of the family, the angels in the house who function as integers of stability in an ever-changing society of industrial progress and shifting demographics. Fiction, theatre and paintings emblematised this struggle for spiritual and mythical meaning, or what Brooks defines as the moral occult, through the representation of recognisably evil villains, worthy heroes and innocent heroines in distress, with a clear-cut resolution of upholding moral virtue or being punished for deviance. 

Within these conventions of Victorian morality Ada must also pay a price for her adultery. Infused by Bronte’s wild landscape of Wuthering Heights, Campion films in a Gothic, moody, ruthless atmosphere as the plot reaches terrifying and mythological proportions. Ada slips away through the unforgiving mud to meet Baines, and we witness the terrible consequences of female deviance in nineteenth-century culture when Stewart, who has spied on Ada and Baines making love, blocks her way and brutally attempts to rape her. Ironically in her struggle to escape, it is Ada’s hooped petticoats, so representative of Victorian restriction, which protect her, as well as the arrival of Flora on the scene. But in the final outcome, when Ada sends her daughter to give Baines a piano key inscribed with her love, Flora betrays her to Stewart. Ominous as a wood-chopper in a Brothers Grimm tale, Stewart wielding his axe, drags Ada from the house, holds her hand onto the woodblock and brutally chops off her finger. In shock she staggers away, sinks slowly into the mud, her ballooning skirt holding her up like fragile doll. 

In this violent scene, Stewart is represented as the Bluebeard villain, the oppressive patriarch who owns his wife as property. But, this melodramatic villainy is also tempered for a more contemporary audience. Campion represents him also as a victim of his cultural and class limitations, the outsider, the voyeur, unable to relate to the feminine world of his strange wife and as Campion comments in interview, ‘his shell, his place, his future have been broken by her’ (1994: 72). 

But Campion’s feminist plot ultimately reframes nineteenth-century female restrictions to favour Ada’s personal fulfilment, so ultimately, once Ada recovers, Stewart releases her. As Baines, Ada and Flora leave the settlement to sail to Wellington, the camera finally reveals glimpses of hopeful blue sky through the mangled tree-scape. But, in a final challenge to her obdurate willpower, once on the boat Ada rejects the coffin-like piano and putting her foot in the uncoiling rope hauling her piano into the ocean, she is pulled overboard. She sinks down into the blue ocean and wonders, in the dreamy voice-over, whether through her silence it is death she is, and has been, choosing, now and throughout her life – a symbolic drowning reiterated in the suffocating and sea-saturated tones of the cinematography throughout the film. But finally, in the deep underwater quiet, she resists, struggles out of her boot and rises, much to her own surprise, towards the light to start a new life with Baines. 

It is an innocent, romantic love that Campion presents as idealised in a mythical fairy-tale sense. Ada, in choosing the love which has woken her like a princess from her deep sleep, voyages from six-year muteness towards a consenting adult relationship, finally articulated in her motivation to reject silence for speech. In Brooks’ terms her text of muteness has finally brought redemption for her.

But Ada’s muteness is also unusual given the predominance of spoken dialogue in films since 1927. Michael Nyman noted one function of his score was to replace dialogue and in this the music, alongside the gestural performance codes, functions like the international language of the silent film era where translated intertitles moved the narrative forward. In The Piano, the subtitles also subtly link transnational cultures of Maori speech and Ada’s sign-language although politically this is precariously close to reiterating colonial and gender hierarchies. But on a commercial level this silent film aesthetic cleverly integrates international cultural boundaries for export of a crossover Art cinema/mainstream title in the world market. Margolis notes that, produced in Australia with French/US funding and Hollywood stars, The Piano succeeds in promoting New Zealand national identity through location choices and the use of Maori and pakeha (white New Zealand) culture, managing the ‘conflicting demands between the culturally specific and the internationally acceptable’ (2000: 5). 

Ultimately the Piano was an award-winning, critical and popular success and while marking a shift in Campion’s work from the challenging plot construction of Sweetie (1989) to the more coherent classical narrative costume drama of Portrait of a Lady (1996), The Piano also reiterates Campion’s thematic concerns with cultural and historical shifts in male/female relationships, power, autonomy and the eroticising of female desire through a feminist cinematic lexicon, to articulate female narratives which have traditionally been silenced. 

Trish Sheil 

Cast and Crew: 

[Country: Australia, New Zealand, France. Production Company: Australian Film Commission, CiBy 2000, Jan Chapman Productions. Director and Screenwriter: Jane Campion. Music: Michael Nyman. Cinematographer: Stuart Dryburgh. Editor: Veronica Jenet. Cast: Holly Hunter (Ada), Harvey Keitel (Baines), Sam Neill (Stewart), Anna Paquin (Flora).] 

Further Reading 

Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995. 

Stella Bruzzi, Undressing the Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies, London and New York, Routledge, 1997. 

Stella Bruzzi, ‘Jane Campion: Costume Drama and Reclaiming Women’s Past’, in Pam Cook and Philip Dodd (eds), Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, London, Scarlet Press, 1993, pp. 232–42. 

Jane Campion, The Piano, London, Bloomsbury, 1993. 

Jane Campion and Kate Pullinger, The Piano: A Novel, London, Bloomsbury, 1994. 

Claudia Gorbman, ‘Music in the Piano’, in Harriet Margolis, ed., Jane Campion’s The Piano, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 42–58. 

Misha Kavka, Jennifer Lawn, Mary Paul, eds, Gothic NZ: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture, Otago University Press, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2006. 

Harriet Margolis, ed., Jane Campion’s The Piano, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 

Source Credits:

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.

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'The Piano' Film Analysis

Semiological approach.

In this film ‘The Piano,’ the piano is probably, the most significant piece to this film. The piano is what links the characters together. In almost every plot and scene, the piano was involved. The piano meant different things to Ada which made it highly symbolic in reference to the deep connection to her soul and her life. If looking closely, we can see that this is a film about the journey of how the piano played a part in Ada’s self salvation.

The piano is turning point in her life, this is because music can be used as a language. Ada doesnt feel she is losing out on much by not speaking because she says in the intro ‘ I dont think myself silent, that is because of my piano’.

From being oppressed first by her father marrying her to someone she has not even seen or met and second by her husband who commanded so much auhtority over her as in she has no say or control over her life.

Ada commited to refusing to speak at a early age of 6, turning to the piano as a link to her inner feelings. As a result of this she focuses primarily on the piano and does not have any social life with friends or other people. So looking at it like this you can say that the piano is also like a ‘coffin’ to Ada.After spending time with Baines , doing ‘favors’ to earn her piano back after it was traded for land to her husband.

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“ Amazing writer! I am really satisfied with her work. An excellent price as well. ”

After Ada found true love with Baines as he treated her as a equal, Ada does not bother with the piano anymore. She wants to enter into the real world and have a normal life,Ada then demands that the piano be thrown overboard which would allow her to unbound her acces to it.

As the crew is in act of her request and throws the piano overboard Ada impulsivley decides to slip her foot into the rope going over the edge and sacrificing herself with the piano only to save herself at the very last instant. This allowed Ada to once and for all leave behind the past of her old oppressive life and the one thing that gave her power and enter her new life with less opression and rise to enter her new profound happier life .This scene represents the weight that the piano had on Adas past and how it could possibly drag her to her death. The choices made by Ada is conveyed by the number of dramatic reversals the scene involves. Ada sacrifices the piano she has adamantly insisted upon having throughout the film said by BARBARA KLINGER.The art film, affect and the female viewer: The Piano. As the music plays at the end you start to root for Ada because your proud of her for finding happiness . She starts to teach herself how to speak again because she no longer feels oppressed with Baines.

Psychological Approach

In the film ‘The Piano’, there are certain aspects and conditions of Ada’s marriage. This emphasizes a psycholigical approach involved, most noticable paranoia. In the film the female character Ada leaves her home and enters a new world run by a man who posses symbolic power of ownership and the ‘king of the castle’ stature. This forces a identitiy problem which causes her to attain a more mature status as a more happy women who is cared for by another man who recognizes her worth.

The ending is very complicated as Ada seems to be free of most forms of being opresssed by a male figure. But yet we see the scene turn back to her under water corspe ‘the piano’ which conflicts the happy end and leaves the film vary open for questions asking if she is really happy. Just as it forestalls easy interpretation, its emotional effects are both intricate and obscure this was said by BARBARA KLINGER.The art film, affect and the female viewer: The Piano. We can conclude from this that Ada has not left the past entirely behind her after all.

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Unheralded Scene: THE PIANO (1993)

In our “ Unheralded Scene ” series, our consultants nominate a classic film or TV scene, which in their view hasn’t received the admiration it deserves. It might be a scene from a classic movie, which has been crowded out by other, more “showy” scenes and set-pieces. It might be a deleted scene which is outstanding in its own right but wasn’t quite in-sync or critical to the final cut of the film.

***Warning: plot spoilers below***

Focus on: THE PIANO (1993)

The film: Winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1993, THE PIANO was a major critical and commercial success that secured its writer/director Jane Campion an Oscar nomination as director and win for Best Original Screenplay . A haunting and extremely beautiful film-making, it launched the career of Anna Paquin, who later became Rogue in the X-MEN series, and confirmed Holly Hunter (who also won an Oscar) as one of the greatest screen actresses of her generation. However, THE PIANO became perhaps most famous of all for the memorable piano score composed by Michael Nyman , which was an even bigger hit than the film.

The scene: This particular scene from THE PIANO comes during Act One, after Ada and Flora have spent a night alone on the beach guarding their possessions – particularly the piano – which were abandoned there by the sailors who brought them to New Zealand. Alistair turns up with his men to transport Ada, Flora and all their things into the forest, but he declares the piano too heavy and unwieldy to carry. When she realises, Ada makes clear her objections to the piano being left behind untended in no uncertain terms.

Why it’s unheralded: Images such as those of the mother and daughter abandoned on the beach, fielding their things from the water; of the Maori helpers carrying everything through the forest; of the love affair between Ada and Baines; and of the moment when a devastated Alistair takes his revenge on Ada… All these linger long in the mind while this relatively simple scene slips under the radar, not least because it’s unusual in the film as being without the insistent piano music for which it’s so well known.

Why it’s great: But the scene is a fantastic example of the single most vital element in making a protagonist engaging to the audience: a goal. Ada isn’t the most likeable character. She’s stubborn, sullen, and treacherous, and even her lack of speech is less sympathetic than it might be, since it has apparently come about by choice rather than illness or trauma (though this is never fully specified). However she is utterly compelling because of one thing, her absolute determination to play the piano at all costs. Because of her passion and commitment to this goal, beautifully illustrated in this scene, we care about her deeply, and this carries us through the story. What this reminds us is to beware screenwriting advice that tells you the protagonist has to be sympathetic; not so. They can be as heinous as a serial killer so long as they’re trying to achieve something and have trouble in the process…

If you enjoyed this article, why not check out our Unheralded Scene: SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)?

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The Piano Themes

By jane campion.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Baines is the character that represents this theme most fully in the film as his longing for Ada begins once he hears her play her piano for the first time. Ada has ignited something inside of Baines that he has not felt in a long time if possibly ever. But it is a longing that is deep and comes from a place where he truly understands her. He is able to know her through her music and by opening up about the way her music makes him feel it draws her closer to him as he is truly listening to her voice which comes through the keys of her piano and not by the words from her voice.

This film is very much about the desires of one's heart. Stewart desires to have a family and create a life with Ada as her husband. Ada desires to be loved in a way that needs no words. And Baines desires to have passion and connection in his heart for a woman. All of their desires though do not match up as Stewart's desire is not expressed in any meaningful way to Ada in which she desires to reciprocate. He in fact pushes her towards a relationship with Baines by offering her services to him in order to learn to play. But it is Baines desire for her that is the underlying reason for him wanting the piano. In the end, it is the unmet desires that cause the greatest change as Stewart's dreams are crushed by the desires of Baines and Ada.

A Voice to Speak

The reason for Ada's inability to speak is unknown. Even she does not know the reason for her muteness. This is a major theme of the film as Ada's voice comes from her piano. It is where she expresses her deepest feelings. Places where words cannot describe are touched by the keys of her piano. As Ada's journey unfolds in the picture she begins to be understood by Baines. He hears her music and is connected deeply to her. It's as if he knows her intimately without words. But it is only when Ada is willing to let go of her piano and let it be buried in the sea that she is able to begin to speak. She finally allows the part of her that only will allow her to open up through her piano to die, and by doing so it allows her voice to come alive as she now seeks a connection with words to the world around her.

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The Piano Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Piano is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for The Piano

The Piano study guide contains a biography of director Jane Campion, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Piano
• The Piano Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for The Piano

The Piano essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Piano directed by Jane Campion.

• The Appropriation of Perrault's "Bluebeard" in Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" and "The Piano"
• Unlikely Optimism in Jane Campion's film 'The Piano'
• Breaking the Shackles: Transforming ‘The Piano’ from Script to Screen
• Symbols for Men and Women in Scenes 112-118 of ‘The Piano’

Wikipedia Entries for The Piano

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Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960): “A Respectful Pastiche”

François Truffaut’s second feature film after his career-defining debut Les quatre cents coups ( The 400 Blows , 1959), Tirez sur le pianiste ( Shoot the Piano Player , 1960) is a cheerfully ramshackle affair, alternately light and serious, a playful film from a director who had proven what he could do after a long period of writing as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma and other journals, who now felt relaxed enough to indulge himself a bit. Shot in classically free New Wave style by the gifted Raoul Coutard, Shoot the Piano Player stars the iconic French cabaret singer Charles Aznavour as Charlie Kohler, a seemingly nondescript pianist who pounds the keyboard with fatalistic indifference in a run-down bar in the slums of Paris.

But not so fast – Charlie is really Edouard Saroyan, formerly a world-famous classical pianist whose career has fallen apart after the suicide of his wife Thérèse (Nicole Berger), who threw herself out a window in a fit of despair after submitting to the despicable “advances” of concert impresario Lars Schmeel (a perfect name for such a repellent character, ably played by Claude Heymann) to further Edouard’s career. Thérèse’s suicide triggers an avalanche of events that sends Charlie to the bottom of skid row, and closer to his estranged family – a bunch of real, if often incompetent crooks – which he had tried so desperately to escape in his climb to the top.

Based on the 1956 novel Down There by David Goodis, the film was envisioned by Truffaut from the start as one “that I would call a respectful pastiche of the Hollywood B-films from which I learned so much”. 1 The narrative, while serving as a framework for the film, often drifts to the side as Truffaut indulges in sequences that do nothing to advance the plot, but rather reflect the chaotic and ever-changing tapestry of daily existence, often pushed to humorous extremes.  In truth, though Truffaut duly paid for the rights to Goodis’ novel, he used very little of the actual text, creating something altogether different.

We stop to listen to a song in a café for no reason other than it’s amusing; a desperate chase down an alley is interrupted by a chance meeting with a stranger, which then drifts into a deeply philosophical conversation; characters pop up and disappear seemingly at will. In short, the film does what it wants, when it wants, and is beholden to no one but its maker. Critic Dwight Macdonald described Shoot the Piano Player as a mixture of “three genres which are usually kept apart: crime melodrama, romance, and slapstick”, but felt that overall the attempt at a genre mash-up was unsuccessful, and didn’t “gel”. 2

Pauline Kael, a much more perceptive critic, immediately came to the film’s defence, noting that it was “full of unresolved, inexplicable, disharmonious elements, irony and slapstick and defeat all compounded – not arbitrarily as the reviewers complain – but in terms of the film maker’s efforts to find some expression for his own anarchic experience, instead of making more of those tiresome well-made movies that no longer mean much to us”. 3 Indeed, this is precisely what Truffaut is up to, slamming scenes of romantic pathos up against alternating segments of comic violence, affectionately burlesquing the tired conventions of the B-movie thriller so that the entire film becomes a delirious homage.

Truffaut knew going in that Shoot the Piano Player wouldn’t be a sure-fire crowd-pleaser. As he remarked to a colleague, “With my penchant for anti-heroes and bittersweet love stories, I feel I am capable of making the first James Bond film to lose money.” 4 To an interviewer shortly after the film’s release, Truffaut noted “I was aiming, above all, to explode a genre (the crime film) by mixing in other genres (comedy, drama, melodrama, the psychological film, the thriller, the love film, etc.). I know that there is nothing an audience hates more than changes of tone, but nevertheless I hugely enjoy changing the tone.” 5

As he told another interviewer shortly after the film first appeared, “In Piano Player , I wanted to break free of the unity of The 400 Blows . When the film is moving in one direction, I intercept it and send it down another route. I wanted to get rid of clichés, glamorous characters, and preconceptions. As soon as one interpretation seems to be taking over, I destroy it, so as to forestall the possibility of any intellectual comfort, both on the part of the spectator, and also of myself.” 6

And it’s absolutely true: throughout the film, there are numerous in-jokes, references to Truffaut’s Cahiers colleagues, characters breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly, and even some sheer vaudeville gags inserted at completely unexpected intervals. Much of the dialogue was improvised, and Raoul Coutard’s inspired cinematography often becomes a part of the action, roaming about restlessly to capture the movements of the actors. Though the budget of the film was greater than that of The 400 Blows , Shoot the Piano Player looks less formal, less cohesive and more slapdash – open to any possibility at any time.

Looking for a film to compare it to, I think of Ron Rice’s Beat masterpiece The Flower Thief – also made in 1960 – for a similarly romantic, open-ended, endlessly exploratory film, willing to take whatever risks it wishes, seeking complete freedom from established norms of mainstream cinema. But, as one might expect from Truffaut’s comments above, audiences didn’t warm to the film’s willfully disjointed structure; the film performed indifferently at the box office, and was not released in the United States until 1962. By contrast, Truffaut’s third film, Jules and Jim (1962), immediately won greater acceptance from critics and audiences as a relatively straightforward tale of a romantic triangle and its tragic consequences. It’s an excellent film, but it’s clearly a much more predestined affair whose conclusion can easily be seen from a distance.

Thus, in many ways, Shoot the Piano Player is a one-of-a-kind film for the director. While most of Truffaut’s work is shot through with a transcendent romanticism, here the director’s approach is to keep the audience always off balance, to work against expectations and even to misdirect the audience if it suits his mood. Shot in Dyaliscope (the French version of CinemaScope) but looking as though it was snatched from the streets and alleyways of Paris, part affectionate parody and part deadly serious, in love with all the plastic possibilities of cinema – even to the use of trick optical effects in one instance – Shoot the Piano Player in the end seems like a fever dream, in which anything can happen, and often does. It’s a thoroughly delightful, puzzling, unclassifiable work: an improvisational homage that in the end bears no stamp more clearly than that of its maker.

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Peter Brunette, friend and scholar.

Shoot the Piano Player ( Tirez sur le pianiste , 1960 France 80 min)

Prod Co: Les Films de la Pléiade Prod: Pierre Braunberger Dir: François Truffaut Scr: François Truffaut and Marcel Moussy, from the novel Down There by David Goodis Phot: Raoul Coutard Ed: Claudine Bouché, Cécile Decugis Prod Des: Jacques Mély Mus: Georges Delerue

Cast: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, Michèle Mercier, Albert Rémy, Claude Heymann, Richard Kanayan

• Peter Brunette, ed., Shoot the Piano Player: François Truffaut, Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1993) p. 5. Emphasis in original. ↩
• Dwight Macdonald, quoted in Brunette, p. 9. ↩
• Pauline Kael, quoted in Brunette, p. 10. ↩
• François Truffaut, quoted in Robert Ingram and Paul Duncan, eds., François Truffaut: The Complete Films (Köln, Germany: Taschen, 2004) p. 55. ↩
• François Truffaut, quoted in Anne Gillain, ed., Truffaut on Cinema , Alistair Fox, trans. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2017) p. 83. ↩
• Truffaut, quoted in Gillain, p. 85. ↩

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How Do You Solve a Problem Like ‘Bayadère’? Send In the Cowboys.

A new production of the ballet sets it in 1930s Hollywood instead of a mythic India, eliminating Orientalist clichés while embracing American ones.

By Marina Harss

One after the other, women in white step out of the wings, reaching forward into space before swaying gently back, arms overhead. Then they take two steps forward and begin the sequence all over again. This rocking motion, forward and back, repeats for several minutes, until the stage is filled with bodies hovering on pointe, as if sustained by a single breath.

The scene is from Marius Petipa’s “La Bayadère,” a ballet that premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1877. “The spectators must have felt that they had died and gone to heaven, which was more or less the case,” the dance critic Joan Acocella wrote in 2019 of the entrance of the Shades, or female spirits, in the second act.

That sequence — inspired by Gustave Doré’s illustration of souls descending from heaven in an edition of Dante’s “Divina Commedia” — is one of the reasons this ballet, set to a mostly unremarkable score by Ludwig Minkus, has survived when so many others have not.

“It’s a simple thing,” the director and choreographer Phil Chan said, “a throwaway step, even.” But the way the scene is structured, he added, “shows you how you can take a single step and give it to an entire group and make it look exciting and interesting.”

Like many operas and ballets from the 19th century, “La Bayadère,” set in an exoticized, ahistoric and sometimes cartoonish India, doesn’t translate well to our times. Some have questioned whether it should be performed at all . And while it continues to be staged around the world, there has been a noticeable reduction in performances, at least in the United States. In 2022, Susan Jaffe, the new artistic director of American Ballet Theater, said in an interview that it was one of the ballets she planned to shelve temporarily, while thinking about how to make changes.

What can be done with a work like “Bayadère”? For Chan and Doug Fullington, a specialist in 19th-century ballet, the solution is to remove it from its exotic context and put it in a setting closer to home, the Hollywood of the 1930s. By setting the ballet in a movie-land far west, and swapping Orientalist clichés for American ones, Chan said, the team was creating “a form of exoticism that is about us, not about ‘them.’”

“The thing is, there’s really nothing Indian about it,” he said of “Bayadère.” “We might as well add a German clog dance or an Argentine tango. It would literally be just as authentic.”

Called “Star on the Rise: La Bayadère … Reimagined!” the new version recasts the “Shades” scene as a dance spectacular à la Busby Berkeley. The staging, produced by Indiana University’s ballet department, will premiere on March 29 in Bloomington, and be livestreamed online as well as at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts .

When “La Bayadère,” was made, far-off places were much in vogue in stage shows. Bizet’s 1863 opera “The Pearl Fishers” was set in Sri Lanka; Verdi’s 1871 opera “Aida” takes place in ancient Egypt; Spain was a frequent setting for both operas and ballets. In 1875, the Prince of Wales undertook a highly publicized tour of India and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), both British colonies at the time. Two years later, “La Bayadère” came to the stage.

While in Sri Lanka, the prince had watched a dance performance, a moment that was illustrated in contemporary newspapers. Those illustrations are the likely inspiration for “La Bayadère’s” fast-paced “Danse Infernale,” a fake-tribal number set to a beating drum.

“It’s so problematic, but the music is so fun,” Chan said of “Danse Infernale.” “My idea was that we could take this thing that is so shameful, find the good parts, and make it fun for everybody.” The number, now called “Bronco Busters,” is danced by cowboys who slap their ankles, twirl lassoes and run with their arms behind their backs as if they were about to grab their pistols.

The story of “La Bayadère” hinges on a love triangle among Nikiya, a beautiful temple dancer, or bayadère; a not-so-brave warrior; and a rajah’s haughty daughter. Nikiya is a tragic heroine killed by a venomous snake placed in a basket of flowers by her catty rival.

Chan, born in Hong Kong, is a former dancer who now works to bring cultural awareness to ballet and opera. He has written two books on Orientalism in the performing arts and, with the former New York City Ballet dancer Georgina Pazcoguin, founded Final Bow for Yellowface , an organization that pushes for the elimination of demeaning depictions of Asian characters.

“I don’t think audiences want to see that anymore, this passive, hypersexualized, weak woman who has no agency,” he said about characters like Nikiya and the heroine of the opera “Madama Butterfly.” “Snooze-fest, boring. That’s not who we are anymore.”

Chan recently directed a production of “Madama Butterfly” at Boston Lyric Opera that transposed the story to World War II America; instead of a young geisha, the protagonist is a jazz singer. She doesn’t die at the end.

In “Star on the Rise,” Chan and Fullington’s heroine, a Hollywood starlet, also makes it out alive and takes charge of her destiny. Her rival has a change of heart. This paves the way to a happy ending, celebrated, in true movie musical style, with a big dance number, a Charleston.

Surprisingly, the translation from tragedy to comedy, and from exotic fantasyland to the world of musical theater, wasn’t such a stretch, they said. “I’ve always thought that a lot of the group choreography in ‘La Bayadère’ looked like dance-hall steps,” Fullington, who has co-written a book about Petipa’s ballets , said on a video call.

The plot, which verges on melodrama, easily lent itself to comic treatment. “If you flip these extreme situations in the ballet just a little bit, they become funny,” Fullington said.

The movie “Singin’ in the Rain” pointed to a way to adapt “La Bayadère” for its new Hollywood setting: a backstage story-within-a-story. In “Star on the Rise,” Nikiya becomes Nikki, an aspiring dancer and actress. Her rival, Pamela Zatti, is a longtime star, jealous of the spotlight. Sol is the matinee idol Nikki loves and Zatti wants as her leading man. The rivalry is professional, not romantic.

Chan and Fullington turned the ballet’s suite of colorful ensemble pieces into scenes from a Western fantasy being produced by the cast of the show. Instead of fakirs (ascetics) and dancing girls with parrots affixed to their wrists, the secondary characters have become cowboys, chorus dancers, buckaroos, sheriffs and falconers.

Drawing upon Fullington’s expertise in 19th-century steps and style, the pair decided to use choreography that hewed as closely to the original as possible, as laid out in ballet notations recorded in St. Petersburg when Petipa revived “La Bayadère” in 1900. Fullington is one of just few people in the world who know how to decipher them. (The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky and the Russian stager Sergei Vikharev have both done reconstructions based on these notations.)

The question was, how would these steps, created in Imperial Russia decades before the invention of jazz, let alone movie musicals, fit in with the new setting?

“Looking at the steps in isolation, without any narrative context, I thought they seemed very transferable,” Fullington said. “They weren’t exotic in any way.”

Simple moves like chugging hops on one leg and “paddle steps,” which have an up-down feel like an oompah in music, recur throughout the ballet. “The choreography is deceptively simple,” Chan said, “and it’s used in a way that builds and builds, and passes from one group to another group.”

Fullington and Chan have combined the notated steps with Western-inspired gestures like thumbs tucked in belt loops and tipped cowboy hats. In the studio, Fullington focused on staging the steps, and Chan on clarifying the storytelling and mime. In the passages that were not notated, and for the Charleston at the end, Fullington has created new steps or used steps drawn from other Petipa ballets.

But perhaps the most important element in bridging the two worlds is the ballet’s score, as reimagined by the veteran orchestrator Larry Moore, whose work includes editing a 1989 reconstruction of Gershwin’s “Girl Crazy.” Fullington sent him a piano reduction of the Minkus score and other materials, with the request that he should, as Moore said, “make the score sound more like 1930 than like 1877.”

Moore mostly kept Minkus’s melodies, while “lovingly tarting up the orchestral material,” he said, adding all manner of sounds and countermelodies. The new orchestration includes castanets, maracas, whips, a washboard, a guitar, a celesta and three saxophones. “I’ve got them playing everything but the kitchen sink, ” he said.

His sources of inspiration included the piano pieces of Scott Joplin, the song “Red River Valley” and the sophisticated Hollywood sound of Robert Russell Bennett, who orchestrated classic works like “Girl Crazy” and “Kiss Me Kate.”

To give the music a stronger dance impulse Moore played around with the rhythms, creating, at various points, a tango and a beguine, and adding percussion throughout. It was also his idea to turn the finale into a raucous Charleston. “I wanted a big happy ending, where they’re all happily dancing around,” he said.

Indiana University’s ballet program, part of the Jacobs School of Music, is one of the few that could take on such an ambitious project. The score will be performed by one of the school’s six orchestras. All of the school’s 68 dancers are involved in the show, as are faculty and 20 students from the affiliated Jacobs Academy. The scenic and costume designers (Mark Smith and Camille Deering) are also in-house.

For the student-dancers, it has been an eye-opening experience. Used to more neoclassical, abstract works, they’ve had to adapt to the filigreed classical steps and detailed storytelling and mime of “La Bayadère.” “You can’t just act with your eyes,” Maya Jackson, a sophomore performing the role of Nikki in one of the casts, said in a telephone interview, “you have to use your whole body.”

Stanley Cannon, who is playing a cowboy, is enjoying something he doesn’t often get to do in classical ballets: being part of a male ensemble. But he’s also excited about the larger picture the production represents. “The coolest thing hands down about this has been seeing the future of ballet,” he said.

Or, as Chan put it, “how do we keep these works that are such an important part of our dance heritage alive, but without the parts that no longer serve us?”

Stepping Into the World of Dance

The choreographer Emma Portner, who has spent her career mixing genres and disciplines , comes to ballet with an eye on its sometimes calcified gender relations.

In Irish dance, precision is prized. But perfection is beside the point at Gayli , a series of L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly ceili classes during March at Mary’s Bar, a queer Irish pub in Brooklyn.

A childhood encounter with an American soldier in Iraq led Hussein Smko to become a dancer. Now the artist performs on New York stages .

“Deep River” is in many ways an apt title for a dance work by Alonzo King, a choreographer fixated on flow .

Robert Garland has held many positions at Dance Theater of Harlem over many years. At long last, he has caught the most prized title: artistic director .

Alexei Ratmansky, arguably the most important ballet choreographer today, has stepped into a new role at New York City Ballet  with a deeply personal first work  that reflected his Ukrainian roots.

Vague Visages

Movies, tv & music • independent film criticism • soundtrack guides • forming the future • est. 2014, soundtracks of television: ‘3 body problem’.

The 3 Body Problem soundtrack includes music by Radiohead, Blind Faith and Lana Del Rey. This info article contains spoilers and song details for David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo’s Netflix series . Visit the Soundtracks of Television section for more soundtrack song listings , and then browse  cast/character summaries in the Know the Cast section.

3 Body Problem stars Jovan Adepo as Saul Durand, an Oxford-trained physicist who believes that science is broken. Rosalind Chao co-stars as Ye Wenjie, a woman who dedicates her life to an artificial intelligence “Lord.” The storyline follows a group of physicists as they strategize against an alien race that will theoretically arrive on Earth within 400 years. Composer Ramin Djawadi ( Game of Thrones ) scored the Netflix series; music supervisor Gary Calamar ( True Blood ) picked the featured needle-drops. Here’s every song in 3 Body Problem , an adaptation of Liu Cixin’s 2008 novel.

Read More at VV — Soundtracks of Television: ‘The Gentlemen’

3 Body Problem Soundtrack: Every Song in Season 1, Episode 1 “Countdown”

• “ I Kissed a Girl” by Cast (00:12): Auggie (Eiza González) visits a bar. A female patron sings the 3 Body Problem soundtrack song (originally recorded by Katy Perry). Jin (Jess Hong) says, “Confidence.”
• “ Piano Man” by Cast (00:13): A bar scene continues. Auggie and Jin finish a conversation with a male patron. The man sings a Billy Joel song.
• “ Take on Me” by Cast (00:14): Auggie and Jin take a cigarette break at a bar. Music by A-ha plays in the background. Jin talks about a CERN code.

Read More at VV — Soundtracks of Television: ‘One Day’

3 Body Problem Soundtrack: Every Song in Season 1, Episode 2 “Red Coast”

• “ Moonlight Mile” by The Rolling Stones (00:33): Will (Alex Sharp) speaks to students about quantum mechanics. The 3 Body Problem soundtrack song continues as he talks about the “many worlds” theory. Will leaves the London Cancer Centre.

Read More at VV — Soundtracks of Television: ‘Griselda’

3 Body Problem Soundtrack: Every Song in Season 1, Episode 3 “Destroyer of Worlds”

• “ Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star (00:03): Jack (John Bradley) hangs out with Saul and Will. The 3 Body Problem soundtrack song plays from a speaker system. Will talks to Jin about animal behavior.
• “ Karma Police” by Radiohead (00:46): Da-Shi (Benedict Wong) parks his vehicle. Music plays from the speaker system. The track drops and then picks up at 00:48 as Tatiana (Marlo Kelly) kills Jack.

Read More at VV — Soundtracks of Television: ‘Fool Me Once’

3 Body Problem Soundtrack: Every Song in Season 1, Episode 4 “Our Lord”

• No Featured Songs

Read More at VV — Soundtracks of Television: ‘My Life with the Walter Boys’

3 Body Problem Soundtrack: Every Song in Season 1, Episode 5 “Judgment Day”

Read More at VV — Soundtracks of Television: ‘Obliterated’

3 Body Problem Soundtrack: Every Song in Season 1, Episode 6 “The Stars Our Destination”

• “ Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith (00:30): Raj (Saamer Usmani) talks to Jin about “fighting the same war.” The 3 Body Problem soundtrack song continues during a transition sequence. Saul looks after Auggie as she vomits in a bathroom.
• “Video Games ” by Lana Del Rey (00:42): Will dreams about Jin during a musical interlude. He purchases a star for her during a transition sequence. The track scores the episode’s final moments and end credits.

Read More at VV —  Soundtracks of Television: ‘A Nearly Normal Family’

3 Body Problem Soundtrack: Every Song in Season 1, Episode 7 “Only Advance”

Read More at VV — Soundtracks of Television: ‘Everything Now’

3 Body Problem Soundtrack: Every Song in Season 1, Episode 8 “Wallfacer”

Q.V. Hough ( @QVHough ) is Vague Visages’ founding editor.

Categories: 2020s , Adventure , Drama , Fantasy , Music , Netflix Originals , Soundtracks of Television , Streaming Originals

Tagged as: 2024 , 2024 Series , 3 Body Problem , A-Ha , Adventure TV , Alexander Woo , Billy Joel , Blind Faith , Composer , D.B. Weiss , David Benioff , Drama TV , Episode Song List , Episode Soundtrack List , Fantasy TV , Katy Perry , Lana Del Rey , Mazzy Star , Music Supervisor , Musicians , Needle-drops , Needledrops , Netflix , Netflix Series , Q.V. Hough , Radiohead , Score , Song List , Soundtrack List , Soundtrack Song , Soundtrack Songs , Streaming , Streaming on Netflix , Television , Television Music , Television Songs , Television Soundtrack , The Rolling Stones , Timecodes , TV Music , TV Series , TV Show , TV Singers , TV Songs , TV Soundtrack

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Written and directed by Ng Choon Ping and Sam H. Freeman , “Femme” is a complicated movie. Channeling old school revenge films with a slick look, its stylish yet conflicting approach is a tough look at anti-LGBTQ+ violence and what vengeance might look like. However, that’s where things get morally shaky and the answer to the question of “do two wrongs make a right?” only brings up more questions. 

Jules ( Nathan Stewart-Jarrett ) is a show stopping drag performer with moves and style. He has friends who love him, like Toby ( John McCrea ) and Alicia ( Asha Reid ), and a clubful of cheering fans. After his performance, he steps out for a smoke and locks eyes with a shifty stranger across the street. Later, Jules crosses the same man, Preston ( George MacKay ), at a shop and the two trade insults after Preston mocks Jules. With his buddies cheering him on, Preston follows, beats, and humiliates Jules while one of them records the incident. The altercation has a lasting effect on Jules, who drops out of the club scene, starts to dress more masculine, and leaves behind his makeup for baggier clothes. But a chance encounter with Preston at a bathhouse presents Jules with the opportunity for revenge, and he takes it. 

“Femme” walks this complicated line between its revenge narrative and self-empowerment. Jules seduces Preston to film and humiliate him by posting their affair on a porn site, and by extension, publicly out him. In Jules’ mind, doing what Preston and his friends did to him is the equivalent of getting back at him. But isn’t outing a form of queer violence? “Femme” feels steeped in a quiet rage without getting as violent or outlandish as something like the rape revenge thriller “Ms. 45” but its seriousness with how it justifies Jules actions feels off. Based on a short film by the same title and filmmakers that follows a vaguely similar story of a Black queer man seducing another unsafe white man, I wonder why revenge for a queer person of color is to put themselves in harm’s way over and over again to publicly out a white self-hating homophobe? The experience seems retraumatizing even if it’s one step closer to Jules’ intended goal. Days later, I’m still unsure of how to feel, and the story’s moral dilemma— especially how it plays out and leads to its final scene—looks no clearer. 

Despite its ethically murky undertones, directors Ng Choon Ping and Sam H. Freeman frames a pretty sleek picture with cinematographer James Rhodes . The club looks straight out of a music video, the bath house is awash in a neo noir blue, and Jules’ home feels warm when his friends are in it or when basking in a candlelit bath. The lighting is so exact, it sometimes mirrors Jules’ emotions, like a chilling fluorescent light to illustrate how unsafe and isolated Jules feels, or when he’s in the light of the TV glow escaping with a round of video games. Even banal street scenes look good enough for a magazine photoshoot. This is not the grimy ‘sploitation revenge movies of yesteryear. “Femme” is polished and cool—even the images themselves feel seductive. 

“Femme” is complicated for many reasons, be it for Jules’ revenge saga or when following his healing as he navigates how to outwardly present himself after the events of that brutal night. We see his pain as he withdraws from friends and retreats from the person he was. We see the physical violence he receives from Preston’s fists and kicks in bloody close ups. Both Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay do a remarkable job wrestling with their character’s inner and outer conflicts, but so much of “Femme” is about the pain of queer life, that it leaves out its joy. Eventually, we see what it means to reclaim power and identity from hate, but it’s a difficult road to get there and Jules’ method may not work for everyone.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to  RogerEbert.com .

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Film credits.

Femme (2024)

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Jules

George MacKay as Preston

Antonia Clarke as Molly

Moe Bar-El as Donovan

Nima Taleghani as Bijan

John Leader as Calvin

Aaron Heffernan as Oz

John McCrea as Toby

• Sam H. Freeman
• Ng Choon Ping

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