Jane Campion’s Landscapes of Desire

Jane Campion has never been a director to shy away from humanity’s uglier sides, nor follow industry templates. Few filmmakers would follow an Oscar-winning commercial breakout with a sprawling, literary adaptation of a Henry James novel. She casts against type, allowing Meg Ryan to sink her teeth into an erotic thriller after years of girl-next-door roles, or guiding Kirsten Dunst to her first Oscar nomination after years of industry oversight. 

The thread running through Campion’s oeuvre is her attention to how both landscapes and human desire drive, warp and change our behaviour. In The Piano (1993), the loneliness of New Zealand’s expansive west coast sharpens Ada’s (Holly Hunter) desire for liberation, while in season one of Top of the Lake (2013), the gothic fjords of Queenstown appear like shadows that shroud the town in secrets. Throughout these stories, Campion is fascinated with how people seek love and sex in a patriarchal world, from 19th-century New Zealand to 2000s New York City. Below, we dive into four of Campion’s most complex protagonists and consider how each exemplifies the filmmaker’s fascination with love and danger.

The Piano – Ada McGrath (played by Holly Hunter)

When Ada arrives in New Zealand for an arranged marriage with Alisdair (Sam Neill), her piano is her anchor, the only thing holding her (and her daughter) to a sense of self in a world that treats her as property. An insecure and jealous man, Alisdair seeks to possess Ada, just as he seeks to possess the stolen land on which he wants to create a ‘Little England.’ The burnt trees and thick mud surrounding his cottage illustrate his barren, hollow pursuit, in stark contrast to the dense and fertile native forest among which George (Harvey Keitel), a retired sailor, lives with local Māori.

Soon after her arrival, Ada’s piano is taken from her grasp as Alisdair trades it with George in exchange for more land, and an agreement for Ada to give George piano lessons soon turns into a torrid affair. On one level, this allows Ada to begin a journey of liberation, but in Campion’s films, things are never that simple. Ada and George’s sex scenes are as laden with mind-games and coercion as they are with sensuality and pleasure. Campion allows these complexities to coexist, as though Ada is testing out what sexual liberation might feel like in a world where men, including George, are careless towards her own agency.

Ultimately, Ada rids herself of the entire concept of possession. In the film’s much-debated finale, while fleeing with George and her daughter by canoe, she asks George to throw her piano overboard, and allows herself to be tangled in the ropes and pulled down with it. She nearly lets the ocean take her, but in a moment of clarity, frees herself and returns to the surface. Many have since debated that Campion should have committed to Ada’s death, but her choice to survive offers a more nuanced resolution: in a world that seeks to possess her, Ada chooses to own nothing, and step towards a new life of freedom. Either way, audiences were gifted one final, haunting image: Holly Hunter floating underwater, shackled to her piano, in a state of total resignation, or reverie – or perhaps both.

In the Cut – Frannie Avery (played by Meg Ryan)

In Campion’s misunderstood 2003 film In the Cut, Frannie Avery is a dreamer. She’s mesmerised by subway poetry, teaches Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse to high schoolers and is frank about her sexual desires. But the freedom to dream is contingent on the dreamer feeling safe, and Frannie’s New York neighbourhood is anything but, with a killer on the loose committing unspeakable acts of violence against women. She strikes up a passionate fling with the investigating detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), a mercurial cocktail of charm and chauvinism whom her body desires but her mind mistrusts.

As in The Piano, Campion pays close attention to how landscapes inform character, this time depicting the urban environment of New York, so often presented as a utopia of opportunity, as sweltering chaos, exhaustingly unsafe for women. In one scene, Frannie removes herself from misogynistic chatter between Malloy and his colleague, only to be mugged on the way home. It’s one of many ways Campion subverts the male gaze. In the Cut is a story of sexual violence that despises rather than exploits it, focusing on the devastating impact of murder rather than the killings themselves. 

Crucially, the film unpacks a dilemma for heterosexual women in a patriarchal world: Frannie wants sex, even when men threaten her at every turn. The intimate scenes between her and Malloy are entirely devoted to Frannie’s pleasure, and casting America’s Sweetheart Meg Ryan is a further stroke of genius that alienated narrow-minded audiences at the time. Twenty years on, In the Cut now serves as a time capsule of Campion’s fearless approach to exploring desire in a violent world.

Top of the Lake – Robin Griffin (played by Elizabeth Moss)

A devoted scholar of Henry James, Campion has always been fascinated in gothic storytelling. The Piano was her attempt at writing a New Zealand Wuthering Heights. Top of the Lake,  her first television project, brought the genre to a modern-day New Zealand, depicting Queenstown, a sparkling holiday resort town, as a community shrouded in dark secrets and ruled by cruelty. Employing harsh, natural light and long shadows, Campion and her co-director, Garth Davis, turned Queenstown’s staggering fjords into towering walls that cage its community in darkness.

Elizabeth Moss’ detective protagonist Robin has returned to Queenstown after years away, her relationship with home strained by a traumatic past and the betrayal of those she loved. Her investigation into the disappearance of a local girl uncovers unfathomably deep layers of local corruption and criminality, exposing a town ruled by bad men. Even through that prism, Campion again explores how people’s wants and desires manifest in such an environment. Robin’s affair with an old school friend is complicated by his complicity in a crime of her past, and even residents of a nearby all-female commune named Paradise sneak away to procure sex from shady local men. 

Campion nudges the story along with a haunting-but-idiosyncratic tempo, paying close attention to quirks of the town that range from comical to deeply evil. Its earth-shattering conclusion results in one of the best TV season finales this century, with a final twist exposing just how rotten to the core this version of Queenstown is – where no one, but especially young women, are safe from the exploitation and dominance of power-hungry men.

The Power of the Dog – Phil Burbank (played by Benedict Cumberbatch)

In The Power of the Dog (2021), Campion turned the Western on its head. The film marked a return to the rich thematic roots of The Piano, namely the wicked ways in which colonial settlers – mostly male – sought to exert control through wicked self-mythologising and cruel coercion. Using the rolling hills of New Zealand’s South Island as a stand-in for 1920s Montana, the film follows Phil Burbank, a swaggering, dirty, banjo-playing cowboy with a tough exterior and exacting eye for other people’s weaknesses.

The Power of the Dog’s pressure-cooker plot is set in motion when Phil’s brother George (Jesse Plemons), with whom he runs the ranch they inherited from their parents, marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow with a teenage son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Though he bullies George relentlessly, he behaves petulantly upon Rose and Peter’s arrival, undermining Rose’s self-esteem at every turn and mocking Peter’s femininity. But he underestimates Peter at his own peril, with the watchful, intelligent teenager swift to understand the loneliness and hidden longing under Phil’s tough exterior.

Where the Western genre has long idolised the self-made cowboy, Campion explodes that myth entirely, revealing Phil layer by layer as a self-obsessed rich boy who deflects his own repression by tormenting anyone who threatens his image. With gorgeous wide-shots of a barren landscape baked by inescapable sunlight, Campion’s Montana leaves nowhere to hide – for Rose from Phil, and for Phil from both Peter and his own painful past. It’s Phil and Peter’s increasingly uncertain relationship that drives the film to its shocking denouement. In just one breathtaking scene involving a shared cigarette and hair-raising innuendo, Campion cements herself as a master of cinematic studies of psychological and sexual power.