Ada is nothing more or less than a total enigma. She's a melancholy figure, mute from childhood due to an unknown trauma in her past, travelling from England to New Zealand with her young daughter to marry a man that she's never met. Despite the fact that we do hear her thoughts through an interior monologue, she feels very much like a woman without a voice. And the film, along with her blossoming (if bizarre) relationship with Harvey Keitel, is about her discovering that part of herself. Throughout her life, she uses her piano as a means of communication. When her new husband sells the piano she brought with her all the way from England, he silences her more effectively than if he had cut out her tongue. By the end of the movie, she may have lost a finger or two, but she's beginning to heal -- we learn that she's taking speech therapy to help develop her ability to talk again.