Jane Campion, who is the presumptive frontrunner for this year’s Oscar for Best Director for The Power of the Dog is already an Oscar winner. She won her first Oscar for her screenplay for 1993’s The Piano, which has been given a transformative new release from Criterion on UHD 4K and Blu-ray.
New Zealand born and raised Campion’s favorite novel had always been Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights set on the English moors. While visiting the moor believed to be the one depicted in Bronte’s 19th century novel, Campion pictured a film version of Janet Frame’s novel set in the harsh terrain of 19th century New Zealand.
Having made her film debut with an award-winning adaptation of Frames’ autobiographical An Angel at My Table, Campion had no trouble in securing the rights to make The Piano her fourth film.
The story centers on Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), and her born-out-of-wedlock daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), relocating from Victorian era Scotland to New Zealand for her arranged marriage to frontiersman Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill). The mute Ada, who finds solace in playing the piano, has had her majestic John Broadwood & Sons piano transported across the seas with her. To Stewart, however, her piano is dead wood that he does not want carried across the mud lands to his home.
Although Ada is physically able to speak, she has remained mute since the age of six, now communicating only with Flora in sign language, leaving Flora to interpret her signage to the rest of the world.
Enter Stewart’s fellow settler, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), who trades Stewart land for the piano. He bargains with Ada to allow her to buy the piano back with piano lessons, but what he is really looking for is sex. The sex gradually turns to love between Ada and Baines.
Nominated for eight Oscars, The Piano won three, with Hunter and Paquin winning Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively.
Extras include commentary by Campion and producer Jan Chapman, a new on-camera conversation between Campion and film critic Amy Taubin, several making-of documentaries, and several more interviews of the filmmakers, including two with Holly Hunter.
Criterion has also released a Blu-ray edition of Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film The Celebration from a 2K digital restoration of the film.
The film was the first international success for the Danish director whose films include the Oscar-nominated 2012 film The Hunt, the 2015 remake of Far from the Madding Crowd, and 2020’s Another Round, which won the Best International Feature Film Oscar for which he was nominated for Best Director.
The Celebration centers around the sixtieth birthday party for the head of a dysfunctional family. Family and friends of the wealthy man have gathered at his country estate. The seemingly docile gathering soon explodes into bedlam as bombshell revelations threaten to tear into the veneer of bourgeois respectability and expose the traumas roiling beneath them.
Extras include audio commentary from 2005 by Vinterberg, deleted scenes with spot commentary from Vinterberg, two early short films by the director, and a documentary profile of cinematographer Dod Mantle.
Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man, Germany’s official submission for this year’s Best International Feature Film Oscar, has been released on Blu-ray and DVD by Decal.
German actress Maren Eggert and British actor Dan Stevens, who is fluent in German, star in this delightful comedy in which Eggert has three weeks to test a humanoid robot (Stevens) built to her specifications to make her happy. Incorporating concepts previously explored in films from Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Spike Jonze’s Her, this one doesn’t offer anything new but takes an approach that is even more welcome for being lighter than air.
When Stevens left TV’s Downton Abbey at the height of its popularity, many wondered if he would ever have another success. Although his subsequent career has been largely disappointing, Disney’s 2017 live version of Beauty and the Beast and now I’m Your Man prove that there is life for him after Downton Abbey.
Legendary German actor Udo Kier has made close to 300 films all over the world. He first came to fame in the 1970s in Paul Morrisey’s Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. In the 1980s, he was in Rainer Werner Fassbender’s Lili Marleen and Lola. In the 1990s he was in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. His most recent film is 2021’s Swan Song now on DVD from Magnolia Releasing.
Directed by Todd Stephens, Kier stars as a retired hairdresser and weekend drag queen now living in an assisted care facility. He has been bequeathed $25,000 by his town’s richest woman (Linda Evans) if he will do her hair for her wake. At first, he refuses, but changes his mind and takes a literal walk down memory lane where he meets some people who remember him, some who never heard of him, and some who are dead but still alive to him.
Kier is excellent, as are Jennifer Coolidge as a former assistant, Evans, and Michael Urie as Evans’ grandson. It’s available on DVD only.
Finally on Blu-ray from Warner Archive, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950 film Stage Fright was his first film made in England since he left in 1939. Jane Wyman, at the peak of her career, starred as an aspiring English actress with an American accent except when posing as a cockney maid. Marlene Dietrich as a glamourous stage star, Richard Todd as a young man infatuated by Dietrich, Michael Wilding as a detective investigating a murder, and legendary British players Alastair Sim and Sybil Thorndike as Wyman’s parents, co-star. Kay Walsh and Joyce Grenfell have standout supporting roles in this highly watchable but dramatically weak thriller from the master of suspense.
Extras include a making-of documentary.
This week’s new Blu-ray releases include Written on the Wind and Summer School.
