CANNES REPORT : 'The Piano' Plays Right Notes at Fest : Movies: Jane Campion's film focuses on a strong woman and startles with its visual strength. Audience gives it a big ovation.

By KENNETH TURAN

May 19, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES FILM CRITIC

CANNES — Passionate, romantic, made with surpassing visual and emotional imagination, “The Piano” has mightily impressed just about everyone who’s seen it at the Cannes Film Festival. Everyone except Jane Campion, the woman who got it done in the first place.

“When the film started the other night, I thought, ‘This isn’t that good, I’m not going to talk about it anymore, it’s not worth it,’ ” “Piano’s” writer-director says, amused at her own presumption. “Then I did get drawn in, but when it got that big ovation at the end I thought they went a bit far. Two minutes of that is very nice, but then my mind started going, ‘The producers have hired these people, they’ve been paid.’ ”

There is more at work here than what Campion, seven-and-half months pregnant and plainly exhausted by the mania of Cannes, calls “the modesty factor. It’s something you can’t survive in New Zealand without an amount of or they’ll lynch you.”

As the director of “Sweetie” and “Angel at My Table,” films that have aroused deep feelings on both sides, Campion, who now lives in Australia, strongly believes that “you don’t want to get addicted to people being nice. You don’t want to be thinking, ‘Will they like it?’ the next time you’re working. Maybe they shouldn’t.”

To be released by Miramax later this year, “The Piano” tells the story of Ada (Holly Hunter), a woman who comes to mid-19th-Century New Zealand from Scotland with her 9-year-old daughter to make an arranged marriage with Stewart (Sam Neill), a man she’s never met.

Mute by choice since the age of 6, Ada puts all her emotions into her piano playing. Stewart finds this vexing, but George Baines (Harvey Keitel), an Englishman gone native, is as intoxicated with Ada and her music as she is with her piano. The resulting triangle, animated by an exceptional performance by Hunter, has the sweep and impact of classic romantic novels such as “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre,” models Campion had very much in mind.

“I love those books and I made this so I could see something like it myself,” she says, smiling. “I was so disgusted with the Laurence Olivier ‘Wuthering Heights.’ It was such a soft-tummy thing, I was so confounded they could make a limp-wristed romance out of that great violent saga.”

“The Piano” has several things in common with Campion’s earlier films. It focuses on a strong woman simply because “I see women as strong.” And it has a visual strength that Campion feels is partly due to her art school training. “I’m not a cinephile. The Cahiers du Cinema boys get awfully disappointed with me. They say, ‘Have you seen blah, blah, blah?’ and I tell them no, terribly sorry, I’m so ignorant, I’ll have to do a course on movie history.”

Campion knew that central to this film’s success would be the actress who played Ada, and she envisioned her as “someone like Frida Kahlo, tall, with eyebrows meeting in the middle. I did not imagine her at all like Holly. In fact, the opposite.”

But Hunter, best known for talkative roles ranging from “Broadcast News” to “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom” remembers that she did not get past page six of the script before “I called my agent, Steve Dontanville, and said, ‘You know, I normally don’t do this, but I want you to know now that I’m really going insane, crazy for this writing.’ I wanted it so badly I felt I would do absolutely anything to get it.”

Hunter says she was well aware that “no one would think of me for this, no one would say, ‘She’s perfect for the part.’ ” So she had Dontanville stay in close touch with Campion, “leaving her phone messages and faxes no matter where she was: New York, Los Angeles, New Zealand, Australia, all through Europe. I really ran after it.”

And when the actress and the director finally met in Los Angeles, “I told her I’d like to work with a dialect coach to show how I would handle the Scottish accent for the interior monologues that open and close the film. And I gave her a 30-minute tape of my piano playing.”

One of Hunter’s advantages in going for this role, which involves a considerable amount of on-screen piano playing, is that she had studied the instrument for nine years and had recently taken it up again after a hiatus of 17 years. And after she got the part, “I started practicing vehemently. I was afraid they would replace my playing on the soundtrack with someone else and I truly, truly did not want that to happen. I wanted it to be Ada playing.” She does, performing pastiche classical music, some of it based on Scottish folk tunes, composed for the film by Michael Nyman.

Now Campion says she can’t imagine anyone else but Hunter in the part and the actress, whose voice invariably rises in excitement when she talks about playing Ada, calls it “the role of a lifetime, an opportunity actors hope and pray and long to get the opportunity to do. If you get it, you’re lucky for the rest of your life.” And also, as Hunter is, grateful to the writer-director who made it possible.

“She is very brave, a pioneer, and there is something in her that is fearless,” Hunter says of Campion. “She honors what feels true to her, and she goes for it in such an unequivocal way, without thought of how it might be judged. There are very few original people in the world and she is one of them. Her originality is shocking, and I think for an artist that’s the biggest compliment you can give.”