Why Jane Campion's The Piano is a classic

Nine months later, Campion received a best director Oscar nomination for the film, becoming only the second woman ever put up for cinema's ultimate prize. She didn't win. In fact, no woman has ever won the best director Oscar - although Campion's latest, Bright Star, a tender study of the doomed but enduring love between the poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, is in the frame for nominations this year. It was at least some consolation that The Piano, which received eight nominations in all, including best picture, won three Oscars: best actress for Hunter, best supporting actress for Anna Paquin (who was just 11 when she appeared in the film) and best screenplay for Campion. The film was an international box-office hit, taking more than $100m worldwide.

The Piano tells the story of Ada, a 19th- century woman who stopped speaking when she was six, for reasons that are not explained. Ada is able to express herself by playing the piano and through sign language interpreted by her daughter, Flora (Paquin). Ada arrives with her piano and child on a beach in a remote part of New Zealand, where she is to have an arranged marriage with Stewart, an emotionally challenged landowner (Sam Neill). Stewart insists she abandon her piano; Ada consequently refuses to give herself sexually to him, and he resorts, twice, to rape.

The piano becomes a means for self-expression of a different kind when Stewart sells it to Baines (Harvey Keitel), an illiterate Scottish settler who has adopted Maori customs and dress. When he asks Ada to give him lessons, they turn into a series of increasingly erotic, even fetishistic sexual encounters. In these scenes, Campion reversed the so-called male gaze to female, with Ada - and the audience - seeing and experiencing the eroticism of Baines's naked body.

To some, the wide international success of The Piano was improbable because, like Campion's other films, it explores the dangerous mysteries of female desire. "What preoccupies Campion," wrote Manohla Dargis in the Los Angeles Times, "is how women become decisive and take the leap, how they plunge into unknown waters, shed inhibitions (and clothes) and... breach the citadel of their individual selves by acting on desire." The Piano's extraordinary emotional power also derives from its uncanny visual dreaminess, heightened by richly saturated cinematography and by Michael Nyman's now emblematic piano music. It is one of those rare films that just seems to work on every level.

"I feel a kinship between the kind of romance Emily Brontë portrayed in Wuthering Heights and this film," Campion said, explaining what had inspired her. "Hers is not the notion of romance that we've come to use; it's very harsh and extreme, a gothic exploration of the romantic impulse." The parallels between Catherine in Wuthering Heights, trapped between Edgar, her cold, sexless husband, and Heathcliff, her dan­gerous love, are obvious. Campion believes sexuality is "the animal inside you. You can't resist it. If you don't embrace disturbance, it will shut down your life".

What may surprise those who don't follow such things is that The Piano has become one of the most discussed and deconstructed film texts in academia, inspiring an entire academic industry, in fact. What's particularly fascinating is how effusive, even physically ecstatic, the normally ice-cool academic reaction to The Piano has been, especially among feminist critics. They seem to react to it as intensely as Ada did to Baines's transgressive touch, thrilled that The Piano was the first film in which decades of dry feminist theory, artfully redressed as a compelling gothic romance, became palatable and comprehensible to the mainstream audience.

"For a while I could not think, let alone write, about The Piano without shaking," said Lizzie Francke in Sight & Sound. "Precipitating a flood of feelings, The Piano demands as much a physical and emotional response as an intellectual one... I wanted to rush at the screen and shout and scream."

Campion can be as self-willed, stubborn and amusing as her strange heroines. Born in New Zealand to idiosyncratic parents who ran a touring theatre company, she spent much of her early childhood in the company of nannies she didn't like, alongside a sister, Anna, with whom she felt intensely competitive, often to the point of hatred. She read anthropology at university, before moving to Australia to study art in Sydney, then to the Australian Film Tele­vision and Radio School. Her sensibility didn't suit the film school, where she was described as "arrogant and not particularly talented", but she began making short films, one of which, Peel, about an argument in a car between a family over an orange, won the best short film prize at Cannes in 1986.

Families, and the dysfunctional relationships between family members, have been almost constant motifs in Campion's films, perhaps mirroring her often troubled and unhappy childhood. "What I think about families is that they're incredibly funny at times, and yet there is a tragic underbelly," she later said.

Campion wondered if her career might end when Sweetie, her first feature, premiered at Cannes in 1989 to boos from the festival audience. It's a very black comedy about two sisters in suburban Australia. One critic even called it a "dankly disagreeable perversion", while another said it was "a ghastly parody of the tyranny of family life". Some journalists cancelled interviews with the director in disgust. "I really lost a lot of confidence," Campion said later. "It was terribly alarming that people felt such aggression at what seemed to me a very compassionate film - oddly told, I grant you, but humorous - and such a little film."

Luckily, Campion was already at work on An Angel at My Table, adapted from the autobiography of the 1950s New Zealand writer Janet Frame, played by Kerry Fox. Originally made for New Zealand television, and later released as a movie, it tells the astonishing story of how Frame's crippling shyness and social awkwardness were diagnosed as schizophrenia. She spent eight years in psychiatric hospitals, had more than 200 electroshock treatments and only just avoided having a lobotomy, surviving to become a successful writer.

Like Ada in The Piano, Frame is an archetypal Campion heroine: these are women deemed "hysterical", or suffering from "mental incapacity", by men who refuse or are incapable of understanding them; men who control their lives until the women find the power to take control for themselves.

After The Piano, at least until last year's Bright Star, Campion sometimes seemed to have trouble finding her footing. She tried, not altogether successfully, working with big stars - Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke; Nicole Kidman in The Portrait of a Lady, a loose adaptation of the Henry James novel; and Meg Ryan in In the Cut, a controversial psychosexual thriller. While the films have their admirers, none achieved the success of The Piano or packed anything like the same emotional punch.

Perhaps sensing that she might have lost her way, Campion took a long break after finishing In the Cut in 2003. It was worth it. Bright Star, starring Ben Whishaw as Keats and Abbie Cornish as his young love, Fanny Brawne, is as quietly powerful as anything she has made. "One of the reasons I wanted to do the story," she has said, "was that after Keats died, Fanny was seen walking the heath in Hampstead for about three years, wearing widow's black, even though she wasn't married. I found that such a haunting idea." Another Campion heroine men might call mad.

With the benefit of hindsight, there's no doubt The Piano is one of the most important and best-loved films of the past quarter-century. It seems to touch people, especially women, on extraordinarily deep emotional and psychological levels. Yet what had, at the time, seemed like a trailblazing moment for women in cinema now looks like an appallingly embarrassing anachronism. Today, it remains the only film directed by a woman in the almost 70-year history of the Cannes festival to take the top prize. And since Campion was nominated for a directing Oscar, only one other woman has been: Sofia Coppola, for Lost in Translation.

Although Cornish, as Fanny Brawne, has been mooted for an Oscar nomination this year for Bright Star, Campion is unlikely to secure another best director nod. The American director Kathryn Bigelow, however, stands a good chance of being nominated, even winning, for The Hurt Locker, her film about a bomb squad in Iraq. That grates with some Campion admirers. "The Hurt Locker is a stereotypically macho film," says Caryn James, of The New York Times, "while Jane Campion's beautiful, poetic Bright Star plays into stereotypes of what a woman film-maker might do. I'm glad Bigelow made the film she wanted to make, but real progress will come when we stop looking at poetic films as if they exist in some lesser, female category."

The sadness about The Piano, however, is that Campion wasn't able to savour its success at the time. Barely a month after she won at Cannes, Jasper, her first child, died just 12 days after he was born. Campion has called this time "the most dire chapter of my life... the success of The Piano escaped me completely". Like her own strange and fabulously powerful heroines, however, Campion survived the tragedy and seems to have found her voice again. She has since had a daughter, Alice, now 15, whom she calls her touchstone.