In The Piano, the third feature from director-writer Jane Campion, reveals an emotional undercurrent and a churning intensity absent from her previous work. Campion also guides Holly Hunter into a revelatory performance of silent film majesty as a self-willed mute of piercing intelligence who must come to grips with her repressed emotions and erotic passions while, at the same time, waging a silent personal rebellion against her demeaned sexual status in the patriarchal prison of a newly colonized New Zealand.

Ada McGrath (Hunter) and her strong-willed young daughter (Anna Paquin) find themselves in the New Zealand wilderness, with Ada the imported bride of the local dullard land-grabber Stewart (Sam Neill). Ada immediately takes a strong disliking to Stewart when he refuses to carry her beloved piano home with them. But Stewart makes a deal with the overseer of his land, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), to take the piano off his hands. Attracted to Ada, Baines agrees to return the piano to her in exchange for a series of piano lessons -- lessons that become a series of increasingly charged sexual encounters. In their lovemaking, Ada and Baines discover a common bond and a release from their loneliness, but Stewart, finding that Ada has fallen in love with Baines, enacts a bit of Old Testament retribution upon her. And, as the pent-up emotions of rage and desire swirl around them, the savage wilderness begins to consume the tiny European conclave.

Campion imbues her tale with an over-ripe tactility and a murky, poetic undertow that betrays the confined, yet overpowering, emotions of the main characters -- Ada's buried sensuality, Blaine's hidden tenderness, and Stewart's suppressed anger and violence. The story unfolds like a Greek tragedy of the Outback, complete with a chorus of Maori tribesmen and a blithely uncaring atmosphere, enveloping the characters like an additional player. And Campion directs all this with a discreet detachment, observing one character through glances and squints of another as they peer through wooden slats, through airy curtains, and through the spaces in a character's fingers. By implicating the audience in the characters' gaze, she makes the film immediate and urgent.

Devoid of her tinny drawl, Holly Hunter carries the film away. Relying on expressive glances and body language to convey her soulful depths, Hunter is like a modern day Lillian Gish and delivers a great performance. In an unlikely bit of casting as the romantic lover, Harvey Keitel is surprisingly effective. And Sam Neill, as has become his specialty since The Piano, lends a tinge of sadness to his Filthy McNasty role.

Campion achieves something very rare in contemporary cinema -- a poetry of expression told in the form of an off-center melodrama. The Piano has the passionate intensity of a D.W. Griffith mytho-poetic mood piece, updated from silent Victorian romantic aesthetics to a modern explosion of the repressed.