The Globe and Mail - January 5, 1996

"Actresses showcased in CBC film"
John Haslett Cuff

SUNDAY night's CBC movie of the week, Under the Piano, is a well-acted melodrama about an autistic savant, her twisted mother and extraordinarily devoted sister. Produced by Sullivan Entertainment (Road to Avonlea) and directed by Stefan Scaini, it is one of those decade-spanning sagas of family heartbreak and misunderstanding that ultimately works out fine for everyone, including the kind of audience that prefers a tidy, happy ending.

The film is a showcase for the three lead actresses, and it is only their performances which sustain the viewer's interest, since the "true- story" plot is predictable. Teresa Stratas has the plum role, that of the mother, a retired operatic star who reminds everyone (at every opportunity) that she sacrificed her career and her talent to her children, only to be "punished by God" in giving birth to a physically handicapped daughter, played by Amanda Plummer, and an autistic one, played by Megan Follows.

Rosetta (Follows) is one of those silent, troubled children who seem to inhabit a world of their own, and her mother, who is not especially mature herself, basically gives up on her. But her sister Francesca (Plummer) does everything in her power to try to draw Rosetta out and teach her things. It is a musical family, and Rosetta, without any apparent instruction, is able to sit at the piano and play anything she hears. But "Mommie dearest" dismisses her as a mimic, and yanks her away from the piano whenever she starts to play. As all the children grow up and leave home, Rosetta becomes ever more tormented by her repressive and unloving mother until she finally attempts suicide. Francesca, now married, returns home and eventually assumes legal custody of her sister.

This is a classy-looking production, with all the earmarks of a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. Stratas is superbly infuriating, but it is difficult to understand why her character, as a musician, would so brutally suppress her daughter's musical inclinations, unless she somehow feels threatened by this gifted child she seems incapable of loving. Follows is also excellent, creating a character as unusual and mysterious as mental illness itself, but doing so with an admirable degree of subtlety and restraint. Plummer, always an accomplished performer, has the least complex and least interesting role.

Strangely, though this is a well-executed and handsome production, it never engaged me emotionally. Perhaps because the story takes place in the past (the 1930s through the 1950s), I was always acutely aware that this was play-acting, artfully calculated to push certain emotional buttons and fulfill the most limited of audience expectations. As such, Under the Piano succeeds admirably.

Source: The Globe and Mail

The Province - January 5, 1996

"No soapish drivel this time: Under the Piano is what TV movies ought to be"
Ray chagelin

Quite simply, Under the Piano is one of the best pieces of television I've seen in ages.

In a season that has seen an abundance of mediocrity and failed promises, this television movie on Sunday (CBC, 8 p.m.), has everything and more that you hope for and seldom find in a television movie.

Regardless of what standards you apply, whether it's acting, direction or cinematography, this is a major effort with major results. And it will certainly walk away at season's end with more than its share of major awards.

It just might, in fact, restore your confidence in what has become a desert of soapish drivel -- the prime-time TV movie.

Starring Megan Follows (Anne of Green Gables), Amanda Plummer (Pulp Fiction) and opera star Teresa Stratas, Under the Piano (from Canadian producer, Kevin Sullivan), quickly sets the tone.

In the opening scene, Rosetta Basilio (Follows) is seen shuffling from her bedroom to the bathroom where the autistic savant tries to kill herself by drinking from a bottle of liquid ammonia.

"No pain," she says later in the hospital to her sister Franny (Plummer), "No pain in heaven."

And, as we come to quickly realize, it's her pain -- the pain of someone with autism -- that this film is all about.

Under the Piano is the bittersweet story of two sisters and their relationship with a dominating mother, a former opera singer (Stratas) who resents never having achieved greatness and who dominates the household.

The film, inspired by the real-life story of Dolly and Henrietta Giardini, spans 23 years (1932 to 1955) and is set in Montreal.

Autism is a mental impairment in which the victim is unable to function normally. But, victims sometimes have extraordinary abilities such as the ability to solve complex mathematical problems.

Dustin Hoffman's award- winning film, Rain Man, was similarly about an autistic man who was a mathematical genius.

But this is a far different character that we see from Follows, and a story that is more intense and more realistic.

We see a family pressured not just by Rosetta's illness and the inability to accept it but by Franny's physical impairment (she wears a leather arm brace for a muscle condition), a mother who rules the house with misplaced protection and a father incapable of confronting his powerful wife in her handling of Rosetta.

PERFECT PITCH

Rosetta has perfect pitch and can re-create on the piano the music she hears. But her mother refuses to allow Rosetta near the piano, dismissing her keyboard efforts as mere mimicry.

While Follows and Plummer are the core of the film, it's Stratas who may surprise those who have never see the opera singer on stage.

During her career, she was acknowledged as one of the best singing actresses on the operatic stage.

You might remember Stratas in her wonderful portrayal of the tragic Violetta in Franco Zeffirelli's brilliant film version of Verdi's opera, La Traviata (1983).

That same intensity is evident in Stratas's performance in Under the Piano as a mother who believes she can best protect her daughter by restricting her naturalness.

Regardless who is singled out for praise, this is a collection of intense, dramatic and realistic acting that will keep you intently focused for two hours.

n If you want a good scare, tune in to CBC's Witness (Tuesday, 9 p.m.) as the network airs Ebola: Inside an Outbreak. It's a story that makes science-fiction look tame.

Ebola is a Canadian documentary about the outbreak of one of the world's deadliest viruses in the spring of 1995 in the Zairian rainforest.

Reporters descended on the region, filed their reports and left. Ebola is the story about what took place in the quarantined region after the reporters all left.

The film (to be repeated on PBS's Nova on Feb. 6) is a frightening examination of the diseases we find ourselves facing for the first time and how limited our protection is against them.

Source: The Province

The Ottawa Citizen - January 6, 1996

"Compelling drama uplifting despite heavy topic"
Tony Atherton

Autism is central to the story of Under The Piano, Kevin Sullivan's powerful new TV movie that airs Sunday night on CBC. However, the word autism is never mentioned in the film.

``To define it and put a label on it would turn it in to a conventional medical-drama movie of the week, a child-has-autism-doesn't-connect-with-mother-type of drama, and that wasn't really what I had in mind,'' producer Sullivan said in a recent interview.

Instead Rosetta (Megan Follows), the daughter who doesn't speak but plays the piano like an angel, the young woman who lives a life of eccentric but carefully constructed habit, is described as ``different.'' Different, incapable and embarrassing, in the eyes of her domineering mother, former opera diva Madame Regina (Teresa Stratas). Or different and in need of understanding, in the view of her fiercely protective sister, Franny (Amanda Plummer).

Rosetta's difference is not in anyway a clinical matter in Under The Piano, a period piece set in the 1930s and '50s. It is a provocative character trait within a compelling character drama. This is partly the result of Blair Ferguson's sensitive script, but most of the credit goes to Follows, whose stunning performance brings a complex humanity to a character who otherwise might have been only a dramatic device.

The film also deals with what we would today label child abuse, a psychological battering in a family where love and resentment combine as crippling force. But unlike run-of-the-mill TV movies, the abuse is not trumpeted as an issue but rather blended into the drama. The effect is subtle and far more powerful.

The film begins with Rosetta's suicide attempt. In the hospital, near death after drinking ammonia, she tells Franny, ``No pain, no pain... in heaven.'' The film flashes back to Rosetta and Franny's childhood, when they were the twin disappointments of their demanding mother.

Regina's first three children are her delight, strong-limbed and clear-headed. She drills them on their musical knowledge and fawns over their impromptu concert performances. Franny, however, does not have full use of her right arm; it is encased in a fearsome-looking leather sleeve that makes her the target of children's jibes and the victim of her mother's poorly disguised pity.

But Franny's lot is easy compared to that of Rosetta. Regina is frightened by her youngest child, then depressed by her. She has no hope for anything like a normal life for Rosetta and discourages hope in the rest of the family. Rosetta is not so much a child as an embarrassment, in Regina's mind, a personal cross to bear.

Regina, in fact, has an underlying resentment toward her entire family. They forced her to give up her career in the opera and reduced her to the ignominious life of a singing teacher.

Rosetta's father, Frank (John Juliani), and her siblings try to defend her against the strong-willed Regina, but it is only Franny who is equal to the battle. Her youthful allegiance to Rosetta blossoms into a lifelong advocacy, which includes getting her sister a job in the kitchen of a hospital despite the misgivings of hospital officials. But when Franny marries and moves away, life deteriorates for her younger sister.

The story focuses on the battle of wills between Franny and Regina, but Rosetta is not merely the battleground. Though seemingly unable to connect, she evolves as one of the protagonists in a three-way struggle.

Despite its themes, the film is not depressing. There's humor in Follows's performance and in that of young Holly Clayton, who is impressive as Rosetta at age eight. And the message of the film is ultimately uplifting, not at all surprising from the producer who also gave us Anne of Green Gables.

Plummer is admirable as Franny, a sister whose advocacy becomes obsessive, vengeful and almost self-destructive. Stratas, the Canadian soprano starring in her first film role, gives a performance that heralds a promising new career.

Stratas has said she drew on ambivalent feelings about her own domineering mother in creating the character of Regina. In Stratas's hands, Regina is easy to dislike, but just as easy to empathize with.

The film is based on the story of two American women first made public on ABC's 20/20 four years ago. Teri Rawson, an executive at Sullivan's Los Angeles office, bought the rights and had originally developed the story as a feature film.

It was Sullivan who decided Under The Piano should be made as a TV movie, thinking that in the less-commercial atmosphere of Canadian television, he could make a relatively low-budget movie with a feature film sensibility, the equivalent of Britain's Channel 4 experiments with TV features like My Beautiful Laundrette.

Sullivan's instincts were right: He is currently entertaining an offer for the film to run in limited theatrical release in the States.

Source: The Ottawa Citizen

Toronto Star - January 7, 1996

"Shooting over the top Under The Piano Emotions run high in drama about abused autistic genius"
Greg Quill

Under The Piano is a difficult story to tell.

In television, where sex, sentimentality, grand gestures, extreme behavior, and event-driven news stories define the movie-of-the-week genre, it's unusual and refreshing to see something as intrinsically subtle as this true story about an autistic savant, a natural mimic deprived of the love of her mother, a failed opera singer, nurtured all her life by her elder sister.

Though the producers, Toronto's Sullivan Entertainment ( Anne Of Green Gables, Road To Avonlea), point in their production notes to the number of news stories in recent times about child abuse by parents, Under The Piano is not so much about abuse - there are no scenes of physical violence - as it is about neglect and misunderstanding.

It also focuses on a young woman who, for reasons that are only obliquely referred to in the movie, is incapable of expressing emotion, yet who must engage the audience emotionally so that her early life and character-defining experiences in the 1930s through the '50s have meaning.

Under The Piano airs tonight at 8 on CBC-TV. Based on the actual experiences of New York sisters Dolly and Henrietta Giardini, documented in a 20/20 segment in 1991, it stars Amanda Plummer as the elder sister (her character, as written by Canadian Blair Ferguson, is named Franny Basilio), Toronto-born opera diva Teresa Stratas as the mother, Regina, and Megan Follows in one of the most demanding roles in any actress' career, as the autistic Rosetta.

Considered damaged by her demanding, resentful, domineering mother, Rosetta spends her childhood shut away from the world, though she exhibits enormous artistic potential having sat through countless singing lessons conducted for other children by her mother, and having lived in a household filled constantly with the best music.

Rosetta's only true friend, after the death of their father, is her sister, Franny, who was born with a withered arm and is also something of an embarrassment to mother Regina. Under The Piano chronicles Franny's 20-year battle with Regina, not so much a cruel as an ignorant and insensitive woman, to keep Rosetta out of hospitals and mental institutions, and to embellish her spirit and enhance her sense of self-worth.

Director Stefan Scaini and the producers do a wonderful job of period re-creation (a Sullivan trademark, of course). Clothes, cars, locations, color co-ordination, furnishings bespeak the two decades in which the movie is set.

And Follows does a wonderful job with Rosetta, whose emotional states run the A-to-B gamut from repetitive stock phrases (``Absolutely, Franny!'') to hysterical fits. Follows, aided by some clever visual and audio devices supplied by Scaini, convinces us that Rosetta, though a born mimic and, in her time, a piece of life's jetsam, responds earnestly to loving attention, to detail, and to a settled routine. The raw, frenetic highs and lows of her mother's temperament are poison to her.

That said, Under The Piano has its faults. Plummer, perhaps mimicking Stratas' operatic performance, verplays her part. She screams too much, snivels too much. About half-way through the movie you'll have tired of the repetitive confrontations between Franny and Regina, all variations on a single theme.

And if Regina ever underwent a moral and spiritual catharsis, it's only vaguely hinted at. Though Rosetta finds peace of a kind via her sister's protracted ministrations, no one else is particularly nlightened by her trials and tribulations. The Basilio family remains dysfunctional throughout.

That's life, of course. Survival is the first imperative, perhaps all we can hope for.

Source: Toronto Star

The Windsor Star - Janurary 6, 1996

"Piano sounds powerful notes"
Ted Shaw

Canada's Sullivan Entertainment, makers of quality family programming like Road To Avonlea and Anne of Green Gables, has changed gears for this Sunday's powerful story of child abuse and autism, Under The Piano.

Under The Piano, starring Megan Follows and Teresa Stratas, airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Channel 9, cable 10.

Based on actual events, the film tells of an autistic savant, Rosetta (Megan Follows), who is psychologically abused by her overbearing and protective mother, Regina (Teresa Stratas). Amanda Plummer turns in a terrific performance as Rosetta's sister, Franny, who comes between Rosetta and her mother.

The story takes place between 1932 and 1955 and is told in flashbacks. Blair Ferguson's script is based on the true story of Henrietta Giardini, who like Rosetta had a gift for memorizing and playing music despite being autistic. Her sister, Dolly, was her strongest support in life.

The piano of the title is the one place Rosetta can escape to in the oppressive household where her mother neither accepts nor understands her condition.

Follows is convincing as Rosetta. There is one scene in which Rosetta is admitted to a mental hospital after attempting suicide where Follows' portrayal of the private hell of her character is almost palpable.

Smothered by protectiveness

Plummer is just as good as the sister, whose own withered arm keeps her from becoming the musician her siblings have become. Franny is loved by her mother, but like Rosetta, loved to distraction and smothered by the protectiveness.

And Stratas, appearing in her first strictly dramatic film role, makes the character of the mother believable. This isn't Mother Dearest material -- there are no scenes of physical abuse or wickedness that would turn Under The Piano into silly melodrama.

The troubling nature of the film is that there are no easy answers. Stratas, who is more familiar as an opera star, appreciates there is a gentleness beneath the granite exterior of the mother, that she believes in her heart she is doing the best for her child by cutting her off from the world and denying her any form of self-expression.

There are some structural problems with Under The Piano in its shuttling back and forth in time. The viewer will find it hard sometimes to know exactly when in Rosetta's adult life certain incidents occur.

Director Stefan Scaini has largely succeeded in conveying the tragedy of the relationship of the three women. Under The Piano centres on their story to the unfortunate exclusion of other details.

For instance, why isn't the father's role more dominant?

In his few scenes he displays greater compassion for Rosetta.

How do Rosetta's other brothers and sisters react to her condition and their mother's treatment of her?

The viewer is left to ponder what dynamics were going on in the rest of the family.

Still, Under The Piano is a provocative piece of television for producers Kevin Sullivan and Trudy Grant, who after last year's Butterbox Babies, have shown a willingness to break free of the nostalgia family fare they have been tagged with since Anne of Green Gables.

Source: The Windsor Star

The Vancouver Sun - January 6, 1996

"Critic's Choice"
Alex Strachan

Under the Piano (Sunday, 8 p.m. on CBC) is the kind of earnest drama that can easily mistake diatribe for entertainment, but this bittersweet tale of a protective ingenue (Amanda Plummer) and her autistic sister (Megan Follows) deftly avoids the usual pitfalls.

Anne of Green Gables' sweet-tempered innocent (Follows) and Pulp Fiction's foul-mouthed harlot have been cast against type, and part of the joy of Under the Piano is simply sitting back and watching two fine actresses play off each other in completely unexpected roles.

Source: The Vancouver Sun