Let's see......how many ways can Campion find to degrade her female leads? I haven't seen much of Campion's output but what I have seen shows me that she can swing raunch with the best of the male directors. After all the hoopla and hype, what was the point of "The Piano"? Yes, it had some style and it had something to say about male/female relationships and power but do we really have to see Harvey Keitel's backside in the process? Wait a minute....I am in the wrong movie, or am I? In this one we see Keitel once again (at least I think that is him in the shadows), a few years older, but no more attractive in the buff than before. On the female side, are actresses that hard up for work that they have no qualms about their filmic exploitation and degradation in such films. There must be other ways of communicating the anguish and emotional trauma of these female protagonists. There must be. What I really don't understand is how a woman could ask another woman to do what Campion does in these two films. Sidebar: what intelligent, talented(?) woman of this century would give in to someone asking her to do such things? Holy Smoke as well as the Piano are exercises in female degradation in the guise of artsy filmmaking. How could I have been so stupid wasting my time with either?