Making Waves in a Man’s World Jane Campion’s Women in The Piano and Top of the Lake: China Girl
On a beach in remote New Zealand, an unstoppable tide surges towards a large shipping crate that contains a piano. Its owner, Ada (Holly Hunter), looks on in horror from a nearby cliff as she’s forced to walk away from the instrument through which she, an elective mute, is able to express herself. Michael Nyman’s rousing composition ‘The Promise’ plays as Ada watches waves creep closer to her piano. At the end of the film, Ada forces her lover Baines (Harvey Keitel) to throw her ‘spoiled’ piano into the ocean as they journey by boat to their new home in Nelson. Slipping her foot into the coiled rope that trails the sinking instrument, Ada sees herself pulled in after it. Her large black dress billows underwater, her arms go slack and her hair swirls with the tide. For a moment, Ada and her piano are together in their ‘ocean grave’.
In another story, in another time, but in the same ocean, a turquoise suitcase burps air, bouncing off rocks, sinking to the sea floor after being pushed off a cliff. The contents of the suitcase are a mystery. Soon, it rises slowly: First, with a ribbon of black hair streaming through a crack in the suitcase. Then, with a trail of bubbles, the suitcase lifts itself steadily – like someone standing up – until it finds air, bobbing to the surface. Fifty minutes of screen time later, waves the same colour as the case push it towards the beach, where lifeguards drag it ashore. Another five
