Welcome to Jane Campion month! When I asked you all to vote for our next Female Filmmaker, I was surprised when the New Zealand native won nearly half of the vote. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. Jane Campion is one of the most honored ladies on our list! She’s been nominated for two Academy Awards (one of which she won) and two Golden Globes for The Piano in 1994, garnered three Emmy nominations for Top of the Lake two years ago, and she won the Palm d’Or in 1986, before our story with her even starts! We pick up with her three years after her prestigious win, with a sad, strange, sometimes silly story of one weird woman’s even weirder family.
If taken at face value, Sweetie is a cautionary about how a daughter's untreated mental illness can cause an already unstable family to disintegrate. But nothing in Campion's surreal story is meant to be taken at face value. With the help of (lady!) cinematographer Sally Bongers, Campion shows a gift for making the mundane malevolent. When cast under shadows and seen through a wide angle lens, plastic furniture, dappled rugs, and the brightly-colored trappings of middle class suburbia suddenly suggest something rotten in the state of Australia. Campion refuses to shy away from the ugliness of her characters, instead covering them with candy colors that make them all the more grotesque.
Jane Campion's twisted family story after the jump
The main character is Kay (Karen Colston), a woman who firmly believes she is not in control of her own destiny. Kay falls in love with a man because tea leaves tell her that she will, sees ill omens in trees, and generally behaves like she’s trapped in a Greek tragedy. Even worse, she might be right - although not in the way she thinks.
It’s not an unseen, unknowable force that controls Kay’s destiny, but rather her familiar, loud, and attention-grabbing family. Her mother leaves her father, her father dotes on her sister, and her sister (from whom the film gets its title), combines the emotional maturity of a ten year old with the destructive force of a hurricane. Once Sweetie (Geneviève Lemon) blows back into Kay’s life with a drug addict boyfriend and a dream to be an actress, both the narrative and Kay’s agency fracture. From that point on, the film spirals into a series of vignettes of increasing strangeness, involving cowboys, treehouses, kiddie pools, and agents. And at the center of the swirling madness stands Sweetie.
Of the directors we’ve covered so far, Jane Campion is the first to have so fully realized a feature film debut. As a director, Campion shows none of the typical first-film timidity or lack of discipline. Sweetie is audacious. It eschews a typical plot structure, but the frenetic energy of each scene feels like the film is spinning forward towards a resolution, though the end is as surprising and unsettling as the rest. Campion also draws strong performances from her main actors, both Colston's obsessive, guarded Kay, and Lemon's all-id Sweetie. From the uncanny camera to the tragicomic characters, there's almost nothing about the film that suggests a first effort.
This deft control is entirely due to experience. Campion had already directed 5 shorts, a TV show, and a made-for-TV movie by the time she began filming Sweetie. In fact, her first short film, Peel, had won the Palm d’Or at Cannes in 1986. While Campion would continue to make films with themes similar to Sweetie - trapped women, psychological dramas, and powerful imagery would remain a constant - the contemporary weirdness would be toned down. Campion would instead turn to period drama, and force her audiences to look even further below surface images to really see her characters. Jane Campion's next challenge after suburbia: Jazz Age New Zealand.
This month on Women's Pictures:
4/9 - An Angel At My Table (1990) - Campion tackles New Zealand history in this drama based on the autobiography of author Janet Frame. (Amazon Instant Video) (Hulu+)
4/16 - The Piano (1993) - Jane Campion became the second woman in history to win an Academy Award nomination for this multi-Oscar winning drama about a mute woman in nineteenth century New Zealand. (Amazon Instant Video)
4/23 - Holy Smoke (1999) - Campion turns her camera towards India, where Kate Winslet may have joined a cult. (Netflix) (Amazon Instant Video)
4/30 - Bright Star (2009) - Join us for the Hit Me With Your Best Shot crossover with Campion's latest feature about poet John Keates. This is going to be a tough one to choose just one shot for. (Amazon Instant Video)