Section A Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage.
With the release of The Piano, a powerfully emotional story set in
nineteenth-century New Zealand about a woman’s sexual awakening, the New
Zealand-born Jane Campion has established herself as one of the most talented
female filmmakers to come upon the scene in recent years. The film not only
received praiseful reviews from critics and moviegoers but also won the Cannes
Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme D’Or, making Campion the first woman ever
to be so honored. Campion’s success is notable also because she is a relative
newcomer to the film world: the director was only forty years old and she has
made just three features (including The Piano), a television movie, and a
handful of shorts dating from her student days. Although
Campion’s films appear at first glance to have little in common—her first
feature, Sweetie, is a very honest portrait of a dysfunctional family and her
second, An Angel at My Table, is a sympathetic biography of the New Zealand
novelist Janet Frame—each reflects her feeling for strong-willed, often
misunderstood women who refuse, or are unable, to give themselves up to their
respective societies’ definitions of womanhood. According to
David Sterritt, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, The Piano "gains much
of its effectiveness from Campion’s directing style, which combines the
dreamlike atmosphere of her early film Sweetie with the sensitivity to feelings
that made her last movie, An Angel at My Table, so extraordinary." Also
contributing to the film’s success was Campion’s ability to induce fine
performances from her character. "She directs actors in a different way from
anyone I’ve ever known," Same Neill told Paul Freeman in an interview for the
Chicago Tribune. "I always felt that there was a big safety net under me and
that I was permitted to take as many risks as I wanted to." Genevieve Lemon, who
had played the title role in Sweetie and took the supporting role of Nessie in
The Piano, agreed. Campion is already at work on her next project, an adaptation
of Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady. David Sterritt is most likely to attribute the success of The Piano to ______.