Why are we being compelled to think about how male pianists speak? King Vidor's A Song to Remember (1945) exerted no such pressure. Nor did Max Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Yet, while Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) presented a woman incapable of speech, François Girard's Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1994) presented a man who was abnormally articulate - one who in the 22nd film, for example, rehearses the revealing personal ad: 'Friendly, companionably reclusive, socially unacceptable, alcoholically abstemious, tirelessly talkative, zealously unzealous, spiritually intense, minimally turquoise, maximally ecstatic loon seeks moth or moths with similar equalities for purposes of telephonic seduction, Tristan-esque trip-taking.' Now comes Scott Hicks's Shine, an equally arty but commercially viable biopic about a man - David Helfgott (played by Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor and Alex Rafalowicz) - who is abnormally inarticulate. Helfgott's very first words are: 'Kissed them all, I kissed them all, always kissed cats, puss-cats, kissed them, always did; if a cat'd let me kiss it, I'd kiss it - Cat on a fence I'll kiss it - always, always, I will-didn't I?' His nearly final word, self-directed, is: 'Stupstraight' Julia Kristeva might call Helfgott's way with words 'semiotic'. Richard Alleva, in Commonweal, calls him 'a manic babbler whose logical skips and leaps, wisecracks, speed-freak stutterings and surreal wordplays compose a weirdly poetic discourse': a description that would apply as well to Helfgott's more obvious precursor - the Mozart (both pianist and composer) Peter Schaffer presented in Amadeus (1979). His first words, addressed to Constanze, were even cattier than Helfgott's: 'Miaouw! I'm going to pounce-bounce! I'm going to scrunch-munch! I'm going to chew-poo my little mouse-wouse!' The Shine screenplay makes the connection for us. Gay piano teacher Ben Rosen (Nicholas Bell), in a scene cut from the film, describes David's father Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl), as a 'poor man's Leopold Mozart'.

LRB 3 April 1997 | PDF Download