Volume 41, Number 3 · February 3, 1994
Shoot the Piano Player
By Sarah Kerr
The Piano
a film directed by Jane Campion, produced by Jane Campion
Miramax Films
The Piano
screenplay of the film by Jane Campion
Miramax/Hyperion, 153 pp., $10.00 (paper)
Several reviewers of her latest film have called Jane Campion a fourth Brontë sister. Campion, too, has dropped hints that this is where she got her inspiration. Attached to the book version of her screenplay, there is an appendix entitled 'The Making of The Piano' in which she is quoted comparing 'the kind of romance that Emily Brontë portrayed' to the perverse love affair in her film. This statement sent me paging through an old paperback of Wuthering Heights, where I came across a preface by Charlotte Brontë, an eloquent defense of her sister's novel written for the 1850 edition, two years after Emily's death. In it, Charlotte concedes that the central characters of Catherine and especially Heathcliff were perhaps too 'tragic and terrible,' and she finds the Yorkshire setting unrelievedly stark. But she counters that brightening the dialogue or adding a day trip to London would have subtracted from what was most true about the book. Emily's nature had, after all, been a brooding one. Bleak heaths and gnarled firs were the everyday view outside her window. Besides, according to Charlotte, she had possessed the true creative gift, the kind that 'wills and works for itself,' heedless of its owner's conscious intent.
Review, 3013 words
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