Her love scenes with Baines are gamey and strange but also sensuous and moving. Ada’s final fainting in the mud and rain, her stark black dress ballooning up around her, makes her look like some dying sea monster, or a squid squirting out ink, or a ghost. The amateur performance of Bluebeard by the white incomers, disrupted by its audience, is a bizarre and ominous episode. There are many extraordinary images: the piano itself, surreally marooned on the beach, is emblematic of the European imperial adventure. The pain, and the grim determination with which the pain has been suppressed, give a force to the film. We just have to ponder what has happened. She says she lost her speech when she was six (roughly the age Flora is now) but that may not be true.

But it is at least as possible that Ada has been raped – her own father’s culpability is not out of the question – and that her inability to speak is due to this. He may also assume Ada’s situation means she cannot afford to be squeamish about work and conjugal duties. This is what Alisdair believes, or wants to believe, knowing that, in the marriage market, he has little to offer but hardship. It could be that Ada’s single-mother status was due to having once been respectably married and then widowed, and Ada does wear mourning black. So who is the father of Flora? Mother and daughter have a poignant consolatory fantasy about this man having been a German composer. And there is a fierce performance from Holly Hunter, whose face radiates intensity and enigma. And yes, there are literary qualities: it has echoes of Angela Carter and Peter Carey, but these only add to its intelligence and distinction. But a second viewing of The Piano allowed me to see how unique it is. And for what it is worth, I believe Campion’s masterpiece is her less well known Bright Star, from 2009, with Ben Whishaw as John Keats. I felt it played like an adaptation of some forgotten 800-page Booker-shortlisted novel (it is actually from an original screenplay by Campion). I once found something over-literary in this film. It is also about the gravitational pull of death Campion quotes Thomas Hood’s 1827 poem Silence at the very end of the credits: “There is a silence where hath been no sound, / There is a silence where no sound may be, / In the cold grave – under the deep deep sea.” (Perhaps she was savouring the fact that these words would be shown to near-emptied cinemas.)

T he re-release of Jane Campion’s mysterious film The Piano after 25 years is a chance to taste again its fetishism and voyeurism, its strange story of sexuality denied and displaced.

The piano campion