Exploring the ongoing shift in our cultural narrative illustrated through film

“I have not spoken since I was 6 years old,” Ada McGrath tells us from the getgo.  So the piano is her voice and the central symbol of this story about a woman’s struggle to choose life:  this piano, this musical piece of furniture as encumbered with cultural connotation and out of place on this frontier as is Ada swaddled in that crazy clothing; this piano left on the beach by Alisdair Stewart, her husband by paternal horsetrading, who misses its importance entirely, so focused, as he is, on her “stunted” body;  this piano rescued from the beach by near native George “I can’t read” Baines who reads its centrality to Ada’s being and uses this knowledge to do a bit of horsetrading of his own. 

Go here  for the complete Parlor Discourse on The Piano.