Great movie! No this is not the traditional "Romance" but it will move you if you have a soul. I do not recommend this film for those who can not see a deeper meaning ,sadly the beauty of this movie will be missed. Yet those who can i'm sure will enjoy it as I did.

Beautiful!!! Classic.........well acted!

as a guy watching this film right off the bat it's not really a guy type film. but man it just draws you in and holds you.i saw this film when it first came out and was taken by it then.
women will be able to understand it more on a different level than men i believe.

Wow, this was a strange movie. I got the same feeling watching this movie as I did when I watched that movie Oprah made (think the title was Betrayed?). The acting in this movie was great and you can see the parts were written for actors, but the acting jobs were all solo and the relationships between the actors was disjointed at best. This had the potential to be a great story, but the writing and directing turned in into a soft core x rated version of the Jerry Springer show....I suppose they were going for high art and period realism, but I think they missed the mark....the ending did save the movie from being a total wreck....I would only watch this if you have a couple of hours to kill or you were really into a different kind of passion/romance movie.....

This piece does an amazing job at depicting the life in New Zealand for non-indiginous people. It was a bleak and lonely world almost completely cut off from "normal" society. The colors in the film, muddy greys, add richness and setting to the story. There are many types of relationships explored in the film. We are first introduced to the mother and daughter, for most of the movie the daughter is forced to mature and be the voice of her mother. Being so young, yet speaking for an adult, almost living in an adult world, confuses her. It makes her lash out because she knows what her mother is doing is wrong, but can't understand why her mother keeps acting in that manner. But still, the love and dependency they have on each other is so strong. Another relationship that is explored is that of a woman and the husband who essentially purchases her. Forced relationships back then did not usually work. Never seeing someone and then having to love them is a foreign concept to people who marry out of love today. It was no accident the husband chose a mute wife. I think the husband was expecting a gracious, demure wife he could control because she was mute. Instead, he purchased a woman who spoke volumes through other outlets, something beyond his comprehension. The way he ultimately punishes her is not out of character, he bought her like a slave, and then punished her like one. He then realizes through he other man's perception of her, that she is not something to be controlled. Amidst all this, Hunter's character found love in a man who appreciated, and wanted to listen to her music. He fell in love with her voice, the piano, and then she fell in love back. As for the ending, dark sorrowful endings does not a masterpiece make. There is a lot to analyze in this movie, and it's not for the faint of heart. If you were expecting something easy to watch, this movie is wrong for you because it forces you to dig deeper into emotions and be sympathetic to the time and place.

Spoiler alert!This movie is like the Jane Austin fan fic from hell. I watched through about an hour and a half and stopped because this far into it there is just no way to redeem the story.The heroine acts spoiled, selfish, and ungrateful from the beginning. Shocking, considering how hard it would have been for a mute woman with a b****** child in this era to ever land a husband. The rest of the characters and the story are as two dimensional as the heroine.We start with our personality-lacking-lass and her equally bratty daughter being dumped on to a beach to meet her new husband. Her dumb husband doesn't bring enough men with him to carry back all of her stuff so she immediately goes into a tantrum about her piano. They are forced to leave it at the beach and come back later.Instead of expressing to her husband how important the piano is to her, how music is her true voice, she shuts him out and continues to throw raging fits. In an attempt to frame his character as a douche the writers decide to throw in a conversation he has with his family about him suspecting she's crazy. And honestly I don't blame him. If I married a mute woman with a b****** child and gave her a home and tried to love her and in return she acted like a perpetual 5-year-old I'd probably think she was a loon too.The new hubby's best man, recognizes plain Jane's affinity for the piano and drags it back to his cabin for her and allows her to play it in exchange for sexual favors. Very little dialog or character building is reflected through these scenes, but despite the fact that George is an obvious, manipulative, scum bag (with a mug as ugly as something I stepped on in the yard yesterday that I'm pretty sure my dog dropped off) they some how magically fall in love. (I always try to start my deepest and most meaningful relationships with prostitution too. Unfortunately it's only earned me a few unsavory visits to the doctor and some angry ex-boyfriends...)Later the even tempered (albeit slightly boring) husband decides to chop his wife's fingers off after discovering the affair. Yes. That's right. He goes Jack Nicholson-The-Shining crazy and dices her up like a Christmas pig after showing no previous signs of being sketchy or crazy. And they wonder why women are so attracted to bad boys. Movies like this paint such an ugly picture of nice guys and a fancy Monai of guys who force you to strip tease in order to receive your property back. Honestly I feel like they threw in that scene because their test audience was initially falling asleep. It was either market this movie as a cure to insomnia or chop a mute lady's fingers off. Guess which one they went with?A terrible movie, lacking in basic depth and character quality. HORRIBLE.I can't really say much else about it, other than if you like good movies, or period movies, or Jane Austin, or movies in general stay AWAY. You will not like this one at all.