Ranking Jane Campion
Sunday, November 14, 2021 at 6:30PM 
The upcoming release of The Power of the Dog is a joyous moment for all cinephiles everywhere. Finally, after twelve long years, Jane Campion is back with a new feature that won her the Best Director prize at Venice earlier this year and might lead her to more Oscar nominations, maybe victories. Personally speaking, I'm on cloud nine right now, seeing as Campion is my favorite living filmmaker. Having watched every one of her features and most shorts, I've fallen in love with her cinema of extreme materiality and negative capability, her portraits painted with unsaid words and aborted gestures, silences, and voids.
Such is my love that, to celebrate the incoming release of The Power of the Dog, I've decided to rank Jane Campion's nine features. It's a veritable cornucopia of cinematic excellence…
For simplicity's sake, I've only considered feature films, excluding shorts and TV series. Even so, Top of the Lake and Peel deserve much admiration. If you haven't seen them yet, check 'em out. They're worth the effort, as are all works by Jane Campion. With that out of the way, let's delve into the ranking:
9) TWO FRIENDS (1986)
When you're a kid, you think friendships last forever, that you'll always be close, and nothing will ever change. Then, you grow up and learn the truth. To call this commonplace occurrence a tragedy may sound farfetched, but its pain cannot be denied. Jane Campion captures that ache in Two Friends, her first and most modest feature. Like her best early shorts, the picture's focus is on the minutia of human interaction, how microscopic gestures and facial expressions can carry galaxies of meaning, how unsaid words can hang between people, slowly suffocating them.
The director's talent with actors is on full display, though it's the textual and editing structure that shines brightest in this youthful drama. The inevitably of dwindling connections is at the forefront, tying disconnected scenes through emotional reverberations. Lastly, elements such as a funereal opening help define the project as something removed from cheap sentimentality and rosy nostalgia. Instead, Two Friends plays like a sober eulogy to a friendship lost.
Two Friends is streaming on The Criterion Channel.
8) HOLY SMOKE (1999)
Written by Jane Campion and her sister Anna, Holy Smoke almost feels like a parody of those Australian comedies about oddball characters that gained international traction in the 90s. Indeed, it's a movie full of lively obstinance and a need to provoke, no matter who gets offended in the process. Its gaze is probing, ready to find kitsch grotesquery in suburbia and naïve spiritual tourism in a young woman's Indian epiphany. The cinematography undoubtedly regards these subjects with a sort of snarky extremity, turning up the colors to eleven until the entire world is rendered like a hallucination of melted crayons.
Dion Beebe has rarely shot a more visually aggressive picture, ready to stab the audience in the eye at any given moment. And yet, the images are tame compared to the war of the sexes going on in the plot. With Kate Winslet on one side and Harvey Keitel on the other, the Campion sisters have concocted a clash of personalities that verges on sadism, the obliteration of the individual persona, and, at last, a reversal of roles. The actor has never been better, and Winslet should have won an Oscar for the bruised intensity she brings to the role. Holy smoke, she's incredible!
Holy Smoke is unavailable to stream right now. However, there are Blu-ray and DVD editions of the picture out there.
7) AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1990)
Shyness, genuine oddity, and social anxiety are such difficult things to capture on film. Cinema is all about looking, yet looking directly at these personalities feels like a betrayal of their essence. Do too little, and you end up with an alienating clinical study that never goes below the surface. Go too far, and it's exploitative, voyeuristic, if not inhumane. Adapting her artistic vision to someone else's creative worldview, Jane Campion has resolved this problem.
She does this, in part, by accepting her subject's insularity and focusing on the powers of individual imagination to liberate someone, not from themselves but the world's myopic expectations. For Janet Frame, as imagined by Campion and screenwriter Laura Jones, strangeness is both blessing and curse, a privilege and a stifling affliction. This ambivalence – or is it a contradiction? – is brought to life by a superb cast led by Kerry Fox with a shock of red hair and an expressive face made for cerebral character studies.
An Angel at My Table is streaming on the Criterion Channel. You can also rent or buy it via Apple iTunes.
6) THE POWER OF THE DOG (2021)
Watching Campion's latest, I was struck by how I had missed the tactility of her cinema. While obsessing over human gestures and the empty spaces between actions, the director's filmography is also full of pictures so visually evocative you can practically feel their textures, if not smell and taste them too. The Power of the Dog stinks of sweat and manly musk, of wet rawhide, bootleg booze, and turgid cocks straining for fulfillment. It's also queer as hell, a cruel take on the revisionist western that feels like an inversion of Reichardt's First Cow. Or else, its evil twin.
Beware of toxic masculinity and quiet twinks, loyal sons, jealous brothers, the ghosts of dead lovers. In Campion's formalistic nightmare, they'll get you in the end. As a final mercy, you might get a kiss gifted through a shared cigarette, a mix of tobacco and saliva that drips desire, and the executioner's sorrowful farewell. Or else, you'll rot and die, like so many animals in a Montana landscape that looks an awful lot like New Zealand. You'll despair like so many lost souls cursed to forever wander the Earth in search of that which they cannot have.
The Power of the Dog hits streaming on Netflix later this year, on December 1st. Until then, it'll be in American theaters starting November 17th.
5) THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996)
The question of what makes a good adaptation hangs above The Portrait of a Lady ever since its original release. Reviled by many critics and spectators, this filmed version of Henry James' eponymous novel dares to contradict its original text. Truly, it goes as far as trying to subvert its findings, its form. The movie argues against James and offers an idiosyncratic reading of his work expressed as much through textual changes as through audiovisual flourishes.
It's also an airless thing, like an enclosed mausoleum, full of unrestful spirits and centuries-old cobwebs, the air heavy with dust and decay. Watching it, I often feel trapped by the film, smothered by Nicole Kidman's tears and Janet Patterson's bustle gowns. I also feel inebriated, drunk on the spirit of Campion's twisted mind, utterly enchanted by her repudiation of a literary cinema that remains passive when confronted by canonical greatness. The Portrait of a Lady is a sick and oppressive film, and I love all the agony it brings me.
The Portrait of a Lady is currently unavailable on streaming. However, like with Holy Smoke, there are DVD and Blu-ray editions of the film you can purchase.
4) SWEETIE (1989)
Sweetie is a mighty misnomer of a title. There's nothing sweet about Jane Campion's sophomore feature, a most alienating piece of cinema that's astringent to the bitter end. Such is the caustic quality of the film that one's not surprised to learn it was booed at Cannes 1989. The director, however, was surprised or, at least, disappointed. Years later, Campion said she spent the night crying after facing such a vocal rejection at the Croisette. While it's understandable why someone would react antagonistically towards Sweetie, the film's a masterpiece.
Through Sally Bongers' cinematography and Veronika Jenet's cutting, Campion fragments bodies and spaces, taking a nasty family drama to extremes of kitsch abstraction. It's a profoundly uncomfortable film, made more abrasive by the deep ugliness of its characters. These are not good people, and Campion's not interested in making them palatable. Nonetheless, there's humanism to the exercise, a fascinated gaze upon the idiosyncrasies of weird people, their quirky habits, and strange histories. If we were ever privy to how extraterrestrials might regard the human race, we might find out it looks a lot like Sweetie.
Sweetie is streaming on the Criterion Channel. You can also rent or buy it from Apple iTunes.
3) IN THE CUT (2003)
By far, Jane Campion's most polarizing movie, In the Cut's a delicious dream about the eroticism of danger and the messiness of desire. The last time I wrote about the movie on TFE, suggesting it should have nabbed a Best Director Academy Award, many commenters were quick to ridicule the idea. In some regard, that's a reasonable response. After all, In the Cut is a ridiculous film, translating the absurdities of lust through an aberrant sex thriller that feels a lot like the bastard child of an academic paper and some pulp trash.
From a purposefully nebulous lead to an aesthetic that's ripe to the point of rot, In the Cut pulls no punches and makes no concessions for its hypothetical audience. Either you're on its wavelength, or you're not. It's all about subjective perceptions anyway, refracting our experience through the fucked-up impulse, assumptions, and risk-taking urges of an endangered professor. Her wants are the film's guiding principle, distorting reality until it's nothing more than a poetic shimmer or perchance an aphrodisiac cocktail made of cum and arsenic.
In the Cut is streaming on Netflix and the Criterion Channel. You can rent it on other platforms too.
2) BRIGHT STAR (2009)
Trying to explain his writing, casually expanding on the idea of negative capability, to his beloved, John Keats divagates about how one experiences poetry. According to him, a poem needs understanding through the senses. It's like diving in a lake. You don't go into it to immediately swim to shore but to be in the lake. To dive into a lake is to be drunk on the sensation of water on the body, an aqueous embrace. When making her Bright Star, Campion follows the poets' philosophy, emboldening and soothing the soul through the mystery of cinema.
Though describing this particular movie as a poem might be missing the point. Its structure is more akin to an epistolary romance based, as it is, on love letters. If In the Cut brushes against academism, Bright Star runs away in the opposite direction. Feelings are rarefied and crystalized in unforgettable images, instants of pure affection frozen in shiny celluloid, transcending archer intellectualisms. My heart weeps for the moving statues in a flowery tunnel, an artist floating on a canopy turned bed, a guttural scream of grief that still rings in the ears long after seeing the film for the first time.
Bright Star is streaming on the Criterion Channel. You can also rent it or buy it on Apple iTunes.
1) THE PIANO (1993)
It's a truth universally acknowledged that any consideration of Jane Campion's oeuvre must single out The Piano as her best feature. As much as one might strive to be original, there's no denying that the director's Palme D'Or champion is also her magnum opus. A frontier drama displaced to a cold blue island in the Pacific, an erotic character study about an adulterous affair, a wailing scream that takes the form of a mute woman's stubborn silence, a portrait of inaction as a way to ascertain authority over self-identity – there are many ways to describe The Piano, all of them valid.
Like a brilliantly cut diamond, it has many facets. Look deeply into one, and you'll only find an even bigger plurality of beauty, a kaleidoscope of ideas. Though, to think the film's all impenetrable polished surfaces would be wrong. Part of its splendor comes from the rawness of its curated imagery, the constant rain and mud, mutilated hands, and ivory keys carved with secrets. Extreme materiality exists in all Campion films, but The Piano is the epitome, just as much as it is an orgiastic peak of sensuality, music, an ode to the New Zealand landscape in its wettest permutations.
The Piano is currently unavailable on streaming. However, there are physical editions of the film, including a new Criterion disc.
How many Jane Campion films have you seen, and how would you rank them? Please share your answer in the comments.
Reader Comments (10)
A thoughtful interpretation of a master director.
Stupendous with actresses.
My Own No 1 The Portrairt of a Lady,it's the Campion film i've seen the most roughly 10 times,still my favourite Kidman performance,Malkovich lets it down ever so slightly but Hershey is simply on another level,the making of featurette on the DVD is as intense as the film itself.
1) The Piano (truly a masterpiece)
2) An Angel at My Table
3) Sweetie
4) In the Cut
5) Bright Star (just didn't resonate with me)
I can't wait to see The Power of the Dog and hopefully Kirsten Dunst will finally manage an Oscar nom.
1. PORTRAIT OF A LADY
2. AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE
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100. Everythign else she's created
Whilst I respect her as a film-nmaker and writer (enough to always be at the cinema when she has a new movie out, having seen everything escept SWEETIE and TWO FRIENDS), I really don't know how to get on the correct wavelength to truly enjoy her movies. And it's been so long since I have seen any that I can't create a coherent and exact reasonign to my argument. My most recent encounter was with the two "Top Of The Lake" series - the first wasn't bad, but the second was terrible, with horrible dialogue and character motivations/actions that just seem moronic.
I also recall, because of an agreement I had about Campoion with a late intelligent female-identiifying fellow-film-nerd friend, that I don't like her approach to the "vulnerable women using their sexuality as their only power" regular theme of hers (see THE PIANO, HOLY SMOKE for the main examples). Maybe I should say I don't identify with it, instead of don't like. I don't know. And part of me feels that maybe I should go back and try PIANO again after almost 30 years, but a bigger part of me just wants to stay with my opinion and say "Hell no" to that waste of time.
I love Bright Star, but I totally understand why it's not everyone's cup of tea. I saw part of In the Cut years and years ago, and my memory of it is: NO.
Here is my list of the films and shorts that I've seen from her so far.
She is truly one of the best living directors ever as I am so eager to see The Power of the Dog.
Just had the pleasure of watching The Piano on the big screen last night. An utter masterpiece. Great ranking!
In the Cut is a C- or D effort, sorry. It's like a busier, less resonant Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
Top of the Lake (season 1) was outstanding, I'd rank that with her best.
the placement of IN THE CUT is bizarre to me. Not that it's a bad movie. She's never made a bad movie. But there are numerous ways it just doesn't land as impactfully as her other films.
but i'm glad we agree that Kate Winslet deserved the 1999 Best Actress Oscar. People are always Bening or Swank and I'm like "neither: Kate Winslet"
@Nathaniel R-I agree with you on In the Cut. There's a good movie in there but it just never clicked with me in comparison with her other films.
Well, I for one am gratified by your high placement of IN THE CUT! I think it's absurdly underrated, as are Ryan's and Ruffalo's performances. It may in fact be my favorite Campion, with the caveat that I'm no Campionite, having seen only about half her work. She's a director I admire more than I love - THE PIANO being a case in point.
BRIGHT STAR is just lovely, though. I need to watch it again.
Also, I rather liked THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY even if it didn't completely work.
Looking forward to THE POWER OF THE DOG even though your summary also makes me dread its cruelty. Campion really doesn't shy away from that quality in her characters - actually, it seems to fascinate her.