The film that changed my life / The Piano by Jane Campion (1993)

The film that

changed my life

The Piano

by Jane Campion

(1993)

Sussana White
Sunday 21 March 2010

If I hadn't seen The Piano when I did, I may never have made a feature film. I've been making little films since I was eight – I begged my father to buy me a Super 8 camera after he took me to see Doctor Dolittle with Rex Harrison – but for a long while I thought I wanted to make documentaries. I found cinema incredibly inspiring, but I wasn't hearing any voices that felt like my voice in that world. It was a bit like being a singer and hearing wonderful music, but feeling there was nothing in your range. When I first saw The Piano I suddenly felt, my goodness, this is something I could do. It was almost a lack of confidence, before. But seeing the film, the power of its imagery and the delicacy of the way that emotion was handled in it, it felt in tune with who I was as a person and who I was as a filmmaker. It made me see film as a possibility for myself.

I first saw it in a cinema on the King's Road with the man who was to be my husband. We'd only recently met. At that point I knew I very much wanted to have children, and here was a film exploring the relationship between a mother and a daughter. I was excited, but my boyfriend didn't really get it at all. He found it slow and uninspiring. Still, I remember in that moment feeling an incredible connection with the film.

It's really influenced me in a lot of specific ways, beyond giving me the feeling I could go out and do this. It has sunk in at a very deep level. There were shots in Bleak House that were directly inspired by The Piano. The way the humvees move across the desert in Generation Kill, these very still, tranquil shots – they're very like the shots of the piano on the beach. Even more recently, in Nanny McPhee, there are silhouette shots that are very like those of Holly Hunter being carried in across the waves. Anna Paquin who played the little girl is now in True Blood with Alex Skarsgård, who I cast in Generation Kill. She's so, so brilliant in the film and is now working with Alex. I love that.

It's been really interesting to me revisiting the film now that I've had children. It plays very differently, I've found other layers in it, about that closeness and the language between a mother and a daughter. They're a bit young now, but I look forward to the day when I can sit down and watch it with my daughters. I think they'd get a huge amount from it.

THE GUARDIAN

THE FILM THAT CHANGED MY LIFE
Bernardo Bertolucci / La Règle du jeu by Jean Renoir (1939)
Daryl Hannah / The Wizard of Oz by Victor Fleming (1939)
Daniel Auteuil / We All Loved Each Other So Much by Ettore Scola (1974)
Lone Scherfig / East of Eden by Elia Kazan (1955)
Sussana White / The Piano by Jane Campion (1993)
Nick Broomfield / The Gold Rush by Charles Chaplin (1935)

Lynn Shelton / Hunger by Steve McQueen (2008)

Paolo Sorrentino: ‘I never use a crude approach to showing the naked bodies of older people’

After winning an Oscar for The Great Beauty, the director had the pick of Hollywood for his next film, Youth. Why was he so keen on persuading the British veteran Michael Caine to step up?

Andrew Pulver
Friday 15 January 2016 08.10 GMT

F

rance has some of the toughest anti-smoking laws in Europe, but they don’t cut much ice with Paolo Sorrentino. Having taken over an upstairs bar in Paris’s St-Germain-des-Prés to hold court, the Oscar-winning film-maker is openly puffing on what can only be described as a stogie. Coupled with a pair of unexpectedly luxuriant sideburns, Sorrentino looks like he might have just staggered off the set of a Sam Peckinpah western – which, you suspect, is just how he would like it.

Youth: watch first trailer for new Paolo Sorrentino film with Michael Caine

Youth sees Caine as an ageing composer with mournful gaze and slicked-back hair in a trailer that comes on like Sorrentino’s previous film, The Great Beauty

Andrew Pulver
Monday 13 April 2015 16.27 BST

The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) is a hard act to follow, what with its astonishing central performance from Toni Servillo (both ecstatic and world-weary) and wonderfully rendered images of a sublimely beautiful Rome. But director Paolo Sorrentino has got to try, and the trailer for his latest, Youth (La Giovinezza), has just emerged – shortly before it will, no doubt, appear in the lineup for Cannes (due to be announced on 16 April).

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So what do we make of Youth? We know the plot outline involves Michael Caine playing a semi-retired classical composer, and Harvey Keitel as his film-director pal, on holiday in the Alps; and that Caine gets a summons from the Queen of England for a final concert. The trailer majors on Caine, giving it the full Servillo with mournful gaze and slicked-back grey hair. His is the only dialogue we hear: “You are right. Music is all I understand.” We get glimpses of the cast’s other well-known faces: Rachel Weisz (prone, covered in mud); Keitel and lady companion; Paul Dano, with slightly improbable moustache.

The 50 best films of 2015 / Youth / 48

The 50 best films 

of 2015 

in the US  

No 48 

Youth

Youth review - age cannot wither Michael Caine, but Sorrentino could try harder

***

Michael Caine is excellent as a retired composer opposite Harvey Keitel and Jane Fonda in this strangely sweet-natured opera of pathos

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 20 May 2015 11.45 BST

P

aolo Sorrentino’s new movie set in a Swiss sanatorium is a diverting, minor work, tweaked up with funny ideas and images and visually as stylish as ever. There are brilliant flourishes here that could only have come from Sorrentino: superb swooping camera moves, grotesque faces and angular perspectives, and it always watchable. But it’s beset with Sorrentino’s occasional fanboy weakness for pop-star cameos — Paloma Faith appears here, playing herself and not earning her keep. Youth has a wan eloquence and elegance, though freighted with sentimentality and a strangely unearned and uninteresting macho-geriatric regret for lost time, lost film projects, lost love and all those beautiful women that you never got to sleep with. The title has literary resonances with Conrad and Tolstoy, but the youth evoked is mostly that of young women and young women’s bodies, whose allure never fades for men as they get older.

The Brand New Testament review – God's not dead, just useless, in a sweet and blasphemous satire

    

In Jaco van Dormael’s peppy, inventive comedy, everyone gets a text message from the Almighty, while “JC”’s sister gathers a gang of disciples

 

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It is all incarnated

It is all incarnated in Michael Caine, whose face here is an inscrutable mask of worldly disillusion, breaking occasionally into a droll smile: he plays retired British composer Fred Ballinger, currently fending off requests from the Palace to conduct a special Royal Command performance of his early masterpiece Simple Songs. (Fred is supposed to have been an intimate of Stravinsky’s — but this music sounds more like Britten pastiche.) He is undergoing a health check-up at this luxurious state-of-the-art sanatorium, although as he says: “At my age, getting in shape is a waste of time.”

Fred is there with his best buddy Mick (Harvey Keitel) an ageing movie director, here with his production team, brainstorming a new film set to star his old diva friend, played by Jane Fonda. Mick’s son is married to Fred’s daughter and assistant Leda (Rachel Weisz) who actually shares her dad’s bedroom. There is also an LA movie actor Boyle (Paul Dano), another sufferer from that popular condition: self-congratulatory cynicism, who is preparing for a certain historical role, and astonishes everyone at the spa by appearing one morning in full costume and makeup. The two old guys, Mick and Fred, go into a kind of arthouse version of Statler and Waldorf, and they stroll around the grounds, grumping away, torturing themselves by whingeing about their prostate worries and perving over the current Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea) who has won a stay here as part of her prize and turns out to be smarter than anyone thought.

There has already been much comment online to the effect that Caine is playing the kind of role that might otherwise have gone to Sorrentino’s longtime collaborator Toni Servillo, and it’s true that Caine’s air of sticken ennui does remind you of Servillo. But actually Caine is very good in the role, he brings something different, a distant fatherly charm.

If only the film was not so (mostly) marooned in that single location. When the action cuts to memories and fantasies of Venice, where Fred conducted an orchestra, the film suddenly comes alive with power and movement: there is a stunning tableau of St Mark’s Square underwater. Even a very quick scene with Jane Fonda losing her temper on a plane frees things up a bit: but mostly we are drifting around the handsome facilities and grounds of this sumptuous but weirdly soulless open prison with its massages and its heated pools.

There is a poetic richness in Youth which occasionally emerges as Mick and Fred talk about what they can remember of their lives, and Mick’s realisation that there are huge stretches of his own life that he can simply no longer remember: his own youth is more or less a complete blank. It is an idea which is more terrifying than piquant: more disturbing, arguably, than anything Mastroianni’s director faced in 8 ½ — though he himself had youth more or less on his side.

Sorrentino has a basic level of fluency and verve. Anything that this film-maker places in front of his camera is always arresting to some extent: there is a superb shot in which Fred and Mick spy on an elderly couple having sex in a forest: a shot replete with comedy, absurdity and alienation. I am already looking forward to another more substantial Sorrentino film, though there is pathos here, and sweetness.

THE GUARDIAN