The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)

My love of the handful of Jane Campion works I've seen inexplicably failed to get me to watch The Piano with any speed. Happily, I finally got the chance to rectify my error for Spectrum Culture, and now I'm kicking myself even harder for waiting so long. Like all the other Campion movies I've seen, this is fantastic, feminocentric yet universal in its scope and emotional resonance. Her direction should rank her among the all-time greats, and her marginalization post-Piano is outrageous. The Piano in particular turns the period piece on its ear, breaking up convention at every turn with her idiosyncratic, singular camera. Its anti-male gaze distance ironically affected me more than the usual intimate, forced wringing of emotional response. It's not my favorite Campion film, but I can see why it won the Palme D'Or.

My full thoughts are over at Spectrum Culture.

Jane Campion's Short Films: Peel, Passionless Moments, A Girl's Own Story

An Exercise in Discipline: Peel

 

An Exercise in Discipline: Peel opens Jane Campion's career with a bang. It starts with an echoing tap eventually revealed to be an orange bouncing off a dashboard and proceeding in a series of quick cuts that allow no hint of coherence even as a title card establishes its trio's relation to each other. From there, it only gets stranger, using the vivid color of '80s clothes and the countryside around the stopped car to bring out the dysfunction of the family dynamic exhibited by the father, his son and the boy's aunt. The father chastises the boy for throwing his orange peel out the car window, even stopping to make the kid pick up the pieces along the road. The lad's defiance leads him to run away, but in quiet shame he starts collecting the peel long after getting out of eyesight. The woman, meanwhile, viciously berates the man for making them stop, already peeved that she had to spend the day driving with them when she had other plans.

The only thing clear-cut about this movie is the aforementioned card with its postmodern family tree, but even that triangle is problematic: by folding back in on itself, it lightly suggests incestuous relationship, an theme common to Campion's early work in both literal and psychologically figurative ways. Though one generally refers to the film by its subtitle, it is important to take note of the "Exercise in Discipline" tag. It speaks to the fractured narrative exercise: the man forces discipline upon his son, who then begins to order around the woman having no been conditioned into a harder adult male. But it also hints at the formal rigor of Campion's piece, which features segmenting and fragmenting angles, framing and focal lengths by cinematographer Sally Bongers to deepen the alienation and power dynamics of the family. It's bewildering to think that something so dense and fully formed was a student film, and much less surprising to note that it won the Short Film Palme D'Or at Cannes four years later. This is one of the best modern short films I've seen, and one can see Campion's gift for microcosmic, obsessive yet always playful characterization in its eight short minutes.

Passionless Moments

Continuing the splintered framing and behavioral observation of Peel, Passionless Moments shows how our attention focuses in and out constantly. Repetitive sounds, double-take glances and sudden bursts of memory cause people to randomly meditate and fixate on things they do not particularly care about but try to solve anyway. Campion then adds her focal aestheticism to the mix by messing with focal lengths to demonstrate how one's attention is always settling on one thing at the expense of the other, and that the vacillation between foci is random and, as the title lets on, passionless. Though Campion's next short would firmly align with a feminist perspective, it is this film's presentation of her minute detail as merely a series of shots she finds interesting at the moment until something else catches her eye, demystifying her approach even as she only furthers her mastery of the form. Though it's a step down from the fully contained bewilderment of Peel, Passionless Moments is no less vital in understanding Campion as a filmmaker. In fact, given how much more accessible it is, it mght be a better starting point.

A Girl's Own Story

Jane Campion's work may be less openly confrontational than the work of Catherine Breillat, but I find her style to be far more combative and transgressive, particularly in her early work. Her fragmented, synecdochical framing eventually blossomed into full-on paranoia and schizophrenia in Sweetie and An Angel at My Table, respectively, but A Girl's Own Story, the longest and admittedly weakest of Campion's early films, shows that style being used to dive into the female perspective for the first time. A Girl's Own Story opens with girls looking in a medical book at a drawing of an erect penis, their hands curiously brushing along this 2D representation to get a feel for the material. At last their hands move down along the drawn legs to the bottom of the page, revealing a bit of text that warns "This sight may shock young girls."

But if a penis is shocking to these young women, Campion suggests that is only because of its power over these physically changing girls. From Beatles reenactments that have other girls in a Catholic school shrieking in quasi-homosexual frenzy to a boyfriend who convinces one girl to have unprotected sex (leading to pregnancy) without the two even sharing a kiss, men hold power over these confused and suddenly sexually appealing women. One shot, in a clinic where pregnant teens meet, frames these women under one of those garishly graphic crucifixes, tacitly pointing out the religious root of chauvinism in the Western world. For the first time, a slight surrealism enters Campion's frame, a tone she would carry out in fullest extent in Sweetie: one girl's parents have stopped speaking to each other and use their daughter to pass messages between them, only to have rough sex in front of their children. Later, the father joins the ranks of the other men circling around these women like sharks. Campion doesn't force any of these shots, and for the first time Campion demonstrates her ability to completely bewilder and stun with such subtlety that the cognitive disruption always seems to hit just after the tone switches once more, only widening the confusion.

Female Fight Club: Jane Campion's Sweetie

Up at Cinelogue is a new and improved version of an old review I did for Jane Campion's debut feature, Sweetie. A tale of superego pitted against id, Sweetie is one of the finest dysfunctional family movies ever, a blistering comedy and an astonishing demonstration of a visual stylist's innate gift for composition. This is a hopelessly grim movie, one that initially shows isolation, fear, contradiction and spite in a woman before expanding to show how all are affected by these close-minded circles of perception and interaction. It's one of the best films of the '80s, and one of the finest feature debuts out there.

Check out my review at Cinelogue.

An Angel at My Table

On the strength of the three Jane Campion features I’ve seen – her first two, Sweetie and An Angel at My Table, and her latest, Bright Star – I find myself tempted to list the director among my favorite filmmakers. Her exploration of sexual politics, often as they relate to the patriarchal family system, has a richness of character so bereft of, well, most films, really, but certainly movies about sex. An Angel at My Table takes the extreme family dysfunction present in her debut and first masterpiece, Sweetie, and re-frames it around a biographical story of epic entropy, that is to say a quietly personal tale that feels like a saga due to its length and the extraordinary abilities of its auteur.

The subject of Campion’s film is Janet Frame, whom we meet as a round-faced girl with a striking orb of curly red hair and who eventually becomes New Zealand’s poet laureate. Janet, or “Jean” as she is mainly called in the first segment, is a shy young lady, so shy that she even runs away from the camera when it places her in close-up as her adult voiceover somewhat nervously introduces herself.

As with all shy people, of course, Jean wants nothing more than to fit in. In the first major scene, young Jean nicks coins from her father’s coat pocket and buys her classmates chewing gum in a quiet attempt to win some support; for once, a kid did bring enough for everyone. But that doesn’t satisfy the teacher, who forces Janet to come to the front of the class and stand before her classmates until she admits where she got the money to buy gum. The children, fickle bastards that they are, then whisper accusatory statements among themselves directed at their erstwhile hero, who can choke back tears only because she knows they would only incur greater ridicule and shame. I’m reminded of an old Jerry Seinfeld joke: according to an old poll, the majority of participants said that their primary phobia was public speaking, beating out death. “That means that at a funeral,” Seinfeld quipped, “more people would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.”

Jean’s home life offers scarcely more happiness. Her father, Curly, is a cantankerous sot, capable of extreme outbursts when he’s had one too many. Her brother, George, suffers from convulsions and seizures in a time when any form of mental illness was regarded as weakness. Over the course of her life, She enjoys close bonds with two of her sisters, Myrtle and Isabel, but she loses both at key points in her life to drowning.

Even before Myrtle and Isabel pass, Janet still needs to make a friend outside the family, which she finally finds in Poppy, another reserved young girl. In their spare time, they re-enact the abuses they suffer – derisive teachers and violent fathers – in the same fashion one might expect them to hold imaginary tea parties. They form a strong friendship, the sort of bond two quietly lonely people forge that is so often mistaken for romance because it is no less deep and is often so much more so. Naturally, forces conspire to keep the two apart, for so few experience such a bond that they fear and despise it out of confusion and jealousy.

(Incidentally, Melina Bernecker, the actress who plays Myrtle, strongly reminded me of Melanie Lynskey, the lead in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. Heavenly Creatures, despite also being based on a true story, now strikes me as something of a counterpoint to this first installment of Angel’s self-contained trilogy: in An Angel at My Table, the two friends are successfully separated by ignorant parents, while Heavenly Creatures plays out as something of a demented “What if?” re-telling of Jean and Poppy’s friendship.)

I suppose I should admit before I go any further a possible bias toward the film, but I felt a deep personal connection to Janet Frame. As she fumbles and stammers her way through her teenage years and into adulthood – by the way, the casting of Karen Ferguson as the child Janet, Alexia Keogh as the adolescent and Kerry Fox as the adult is so flawless you’d swear Campion had filmed this throughout a single actress’ life – I saw much of myself in this redhead. I suffer from paralyzing social anxiety and nervosa, and, like Frame, I find myself accosted at times by well-meaning people who tell me I should get out more and speak to people. As a serious proposition, such a suggestion is akin to saying that the best way to cure cancer is to not have it in the first place.

But if my shyness makes a connection with the film’s content easier, it also permits me to see more easily just how much it gets right. Kerry Fox walks through her scenes – quickly of course, in an attempt to get away not only from everyone but perhaps that damn camera that keeps watching her – with a recognizable look in her eyes that conveys both deer-in-the-headlights fear and a desperate attempt to suppress that fear for the sake of normalcy. Various people comment on Janet’s hair, both its red color (seriously, being a socially averse ginger is like being a person with bee allergies dousing himself in pollen every morning) and its gigantic, bulbous shape, none of them can understand that Janet would like nothing more than to wrangle the thing into a normal hairdo. As she enters puberty and young adulthood, Janet’s teeth begin to decay, adding yet another aspect of herself that the aspiring author/teacher wishes to hide from the world. The unseen arbitrators known collectively as “they” say that the best acting is the kind you don’t notice; Fox spends her time on-screen trying not to be seen, period. Campion visually highlights Janet’s reserved nature all over the place, most memorably when the young woman blows out a candle that the scene darkens in a light iris effect to contain Janet, even though she blew out a candle in the middle of the frame and not the edge.

Campion’s visual style is nothing less than exemplary. She has a peculiar talent for making her static shots seem vivacious and lithe and her mobile shots so delicate and interesting that you hardly notice the movement at all. Take the scenes in the mental asylum, where Janet eventually finds herself after suffering a nervous breakdown when an evaluator sits in on one of her classes to judge her: all the usual suspects of mental institution movie scenes are present – shrieking lady, quietly mumbling dude, shivering young thing who oscillates between piteous frailty and wiry danger – yet Campion uses them less for shock value than irony. Here is a character committed for her inability to speak to people, forced to live in mass quarters with strangers, strangers who bark and scream and cry from dawn to dusk to dawn once more. That irony is compounded by the fact that Janet is never more left alone (barring the traumatic electroshock therapy) than she is at the asylum; she tries to refuse using an open bathroom with so many people about, but a nurse coldly tells her that “nobody’s watching,” and indeed all the other patients standing behind the nurse lolling their heads never seem to make an eyeline match with Janet’s stall.

Campion’s cheek pervades the film. The dance in the asylum is at once darkly comic and a scene from the most unsettling horror movie never filmed. Before Myrtle drowns, the Frame family takes photographs of themselves on a day off. When they receive the developed prints, the girls notice that Myrtle was nearly blocked entirely from view; a few scenes later, we hear of her death, the symbol of modernity (she earlier took a job as a radio actor) and free-spirited living in Janet’s life rubbed out before it was completely erased. A shot of Janet headed to Europe on a literary grant following the release of her first full novel places her on the stern of a boat in front of what must be a composite background, yet the next shot looks straight down at the wake of the boat’s propellers as the camera slowly tilts up to the horizon, which now looks natural and beautiful. Perhaps the funniest part of the film involves the touching interlude wherein Janet first finds love with an American in Spain, leading her to take a break from writing to enjoy herself for once just as the visuals reach their most poetic tone. (The shots of her swimming nude recall scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt.)

As a writer, Campion cedes nothing to her visual style. Through Janet’s life Campion examines social and sexual mores and the ever-conflicting hypocrisies of the patriarchy. Patrick, an Irish tenant who lives in the ratty apartment building in London where Janet stays during her time in England, practically forces himself upon her, adopting the wooing tactic of simply acting as if he’d already married the lady he’s courting. Yet he asks Janet more than once is she’s “fancy-free,” i.e. a virgin, underscoring the double standard of sexuality that has always existed in so-called civilized societies. Men typically make most of the decisions in her life, from her father to the headmaster who sends her to private school to the psychology professor who recommends her institutionalization to the doctor who nearly lobotomizes her to the publisher who asks her to write him a best seller instead of these critical darlings. Janet acquiesces to these men not because of her adherence to gender roles but because she’s simply too skittish to dare raise her voice in protest (ironically, Janet is given a social independence denied to women of the day despite being more desperately concerned with keeping up social appearances and fitting in than the fussiest and vainest of upper-middle-class housewives). The greatest distillation of the film’s subtext comes in an early scene between the Frame girls and a young classmate they pass on the way home. In their conversation, the Frames mention that their mother belongs to a Christian sect that translates to mean “lovers of Christ.” The other girl, a Roman Catholic, mentions that nuns are called “brides of Christ.” Christianity is a religion founded in part on dogmatic principles promoting patriarchy and sexual repression, yet various sects refer to female followers in sexual terms relating to Jesus, whom we are told was chaste.

Campion’s pacing is what you would call “deliberate,” a phrase that has been by now lazily and ignorantly accepted to mean “slow” and “dull.” She lingers on shots that could end earlier and inserts some that might not have existed all, all to paint a more complete picture, visually and subtextually. She devotes the time to openly and honestly deal with a woman’s first period instead of sniggering and treating it as some sort of freakish occurrence as is the case in so many modern productions (then again, given the degree to which Hollywood starves its actresses, perhaps menstruation is something of a freak occurrence over there after all). These extra moments ensure that An Angel at My Table never loses its focus on Janet Frame and the details of her life as Campion uses it as a springboard for her own thematic preoccupations. As such, her portrait of a fascinating individual is long enough to prevent a vague idol worship of its subject yet short enough to leave certain parts of Frame’s young adult life to our own research for the sake of adding meaning under the narrative to justify what we do see. Personal connection be damned: anyone who cannot see this for a grand masterpiece on a small scale must be blind.

Bright Star

Having seen only Jane Campion's debut Sweetie, I cannot comment on whether her latest, Bright Star is, as some say, her finest since The Piano. I also don't know if it displays her trademarks, if any, and I would venture to say that comparing direction techniques is largely a waste of time as I'm sure she altered her style from the quasi-surreality of Sweetie at some point before the more formalist technique that informs Bright Star. (I did notice, though, that she hasn't lost her flair for extreme close-ups, though the effect is about as far from the grotesquerie of Sweetie.) However, perhaps there is a silver lining to jumping from Campion's first feature 20 years ahead to this, her seventh, as I can safely say that it as marvelous achievement irrespective of past works, and it may be the most interesting period romantic drama I've seen since Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence.

Campion's elliptical style of storytelling is still a part of her writing it seems, and I was surprised at just how much she was willing to leave out when so many biopics attempt to force every researched nugget somewhere in the film. As with Sweetie, as much can be gained from these gaps as can be determined in what we actually see; besides, it's nice to see a period biopic break the rigidity of its three-act structure in favor of something unique. Furthermore, Campion does not center her story on the poet John Keats but on his neighbor Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). On a practical level, it makes sense: when Keats died, he had the letters he wrote to Brawne destroyed, yet her correspondence to him survived. Yet this simple re-framing allows for a more honest exploration of these characters outside of the "genius" of the artist or their relationship.

Opening in 1818 and continuing through Keats' death from tuberculosis in 1821, Bright Star deals with a time when the English upper class was slowly heading towards the edge. The French had already crumbled under the weight of its aristocracy bankrupting itself to keep up appearances, and a similar situation was unfolding in Britain, though the revolution that ultimately reshaped the country was not civic but industrial. Fanny clearly belongs to a dying breed: the member of a well-off family run by a widowed mother, Fanny lives in a large town home with her younger sister ("Toots," played by an adorable Edie Martin) and brother, designing and stitching all of her own clothes.

Brawne meets Keats (Ben Whishaw) at a social function, and later she sends Toots to the bookshop to buy one of his books, Endymion; "My sister just met the author and wants to see if he's an idiot," Toots explains to the owner. Though Fanny enjoys the opening (the famous line "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"), she dislikes the epic overall and has no qualms telling the author so. For his part, Keats finds Brawne to a style-minded minx with no knowledge of literature that would make her opinions worthwhile.

Eventually, the Brawnes move into the house next to the one occupied by Keats and his rich friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), and Fanny teases Keats that he's sleeping in the bed she used to, and that their rooms are adjacent to each other (think of the building setup as a duplex, if duplexes were made with two mansions). Soon they enter into a chaste romance, spurred when Fanny sees John caring for his dying brother and sees him as more than just a shiftless layabout avoiding real work. Fanny asks him to teach her poetry, resulting in lofty, but direct and beautiful, thoughts on the nature of poetry. "A poet is the least poetical thing in existence," Keats notes, implying that those who stop to analyze the beauty of the world are breaking nature's flow. Bright Star wisely avoids getting trapped in the mire of explaining an art as intangible as poetry, particularly of the Romantic variety, yet thoughts like these made me want to give poetry a serious try, outside of what we were made to read at school.

Naturally, their romance runs into opposition, but Campion adds dimensions to these familiar elements, separating Bright Star from the indistinguishable tide of period dramas. Mrs. Brawne knows that Keats, who's not only a poet but a critically despised one at that, has no financial prospects to support Fanny or her fashion. She does not forbid the romance, though, preferring instead to let it die of its own accord, and when it doesn't she largely accepts the pair's love. Charles Brown, the closest thing to a villain, actively seeks to separate Keats from Fanny, arguing that a woman will hamper the poet's talent, that Keats cannot write about the unrestrained freedom of nature if he is not free. Yet Campion undercuts this typical macho nonsense with subversive truths: if Keats must always be shackled to Charles for financial support, how is he any freer than if he spent his time with Fanny instead? Charles himself has a bit of an infatuation with Keats and stands in awe of his friend's talent; in a way, Charles and Fanny are simply two lovers quarreling over the object of their affection. These were real people, obviously, but the sheer proximity of their surnames stresses this.

Bright Star shows a willingness to present a romance against the backdrop of the most romantic expression of all, poetry, while still allowing for realistic emotions. Keats seems to agree with his friend's assertion that he needs to be away from Fanny to create, even though he enjoys his most fertile period at her side. Both characters have their moments of immaturity, though Fanny's outbursts tend to concern John's feeble arguments for leaving. Though these two never progress their physical romance past kissing, John and Fanny's relationship plays more like a contemporary one set in the 19th century, and the film suffers for it not once.

Campion gets the most out of her two leads, letting Cornish keep Fanny's fiery temperament rather than be "tamed" by her relationship and maintaining Whishaw's balance between Keats' lofty poetic quality and his more grounded stubbornness. There are also moments of great wit in Campion's script and direction, such as an encounter between Charles and Fanny where Fanny boasts to Charles that she just read all of Milton, The Odyssey and a number of other collections that week alone. Charles, knowing full well that this is impossible, asks if she found Milton's rhymes too "bouncy." "Not overly so," Fanny responds, and Charles just smiles to himself having caught her out. There's also the matter of Keats and Fanny's dress, him always clad in blue and her in pink, symbolically separated by gender. Campion presents this simplistic equation ironically and, like all the other conventions of period dramas, she gently turns it around into something that places both people on equal ground.

1989 Rewind: Sweetie

Jane Campion made a splash in the mid-'80s with a series of short films that received considerable critical acclaim. Her first, An Exercise in Discipline: Peel, won the Short Film Palme D'Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. In 1989, she parlayed her new clout into a full-length debut, and I can safely say that Sweetie is a film unlike any other I have ever seen. Well, perhaps it's not so original; for all I know, Sweetie could be the logical, for lack of a better term, progression from her shorts, which I have yet to see (though I note that the Criterion DVD of Sweetie, which I can assure I shall be ordering soon, collects her short films). Regardless, Sweetie belongs on the short list of the all-time greatest feature-length debuts, and it boldly announces a fearsome talent in Campion.

Campion opens the film on Kay (Karen Colston), a timid, mousy woman somewhere in her 20s, having tea leaves read by a fortune teller. The teller spins the usual yarn, but Kay hangs on every word, especially when the fortune teller mentions a man in her future with a question mark on his forehead. As fate would have it, she heads to work only to find that one of her co-workers has just gotten engaged to a man with a mole on his forehead that aligns cosmically with a wayward curl of hair to form the symbol. She meets Louis in the parking lot, tells him that they're meant to be together, and the two start having sex right there under a car, quite literally under Louis' fiancée's nose.

The film then jumps 13 months into the future, the first of many narrative ellipses. The couple, last seen lost in mutual infatuation on the concrete ground of a parking lot, are moving into a house together. We can only assume things have been going well, as Louis celebrates the occasion by tearing out their clothesline to plant a tree. "It'll be our anniversary tree," he chimes. But Kay, already shown to be superstitious, remarks that the leaves are yellow and, despite reassurances that all the plant needs is water and light, she begins to fret that the tree will die, symbolizing a doomed relationship.

Here, the cracks in an otherwise arty but still relatively straight-faced story begin to form. Kay, distressed that the tree will die and take their relationship with them, tears out the sapling in the middle of the night and hides it under the guest bed. Soon after, she catches cold and moves into the guest bed, though she declines to return to the marital bed when she recovers, looking relieved not to have to worry about sex anymore. For his part, Louis doesn't seem to mind too much either, and when the two get in bed at one point to try and have a go at it, both of them undress methodically as if it were a job, and they come to a mutual agreement that it feels too much like mating with a sibling.

Before Kay and Louis can figure out where they stand with their relationship, however, Kay's family comes out of the woodwork, collectively suffering from their own issues. Kay's parents, Gordon and Flo, have decided on a trial separation, though why or how they've reached this stage they don't tell us. Flo heads off into the Outback, and Gordon comes to live with Kay for a while to keep his anger and grief in check. Gordon's appearance causes a subtle amount of stress in Kay's life, as she too must try to glean what happened between her parents as she tries to salvage her own relationship.

But whatever discomfort her father caused cannot compare to the re-emergence of her big sister Dawn, a.k.a. Sweetie (Genevieve Lemon). A spoiled brat that never outgrow being a child (and not in that playful way we refer to people as "big kids"), Sweetie breaks into Kay's house when no one answers the door, and her sister and Louis return to find Sweetie clearly in the middle of a romp with her new "producer," Bob. We glean from interactions between Sweetie and Gordon that the father doted upon the daughter and favored her above both the other child and the wife. His enthusiasm for whatever attention-grabbing trick Sweetie pulled as a child has ingrained in her a pathological need to be the center of attention.

Sweetie's return sets up a Freudian nightmare of sibling conflict: Kay, the paranoid superego versus Dawn the unrestrained id. Dawn, now overweight and hanging on to a junkie as her producer/agent in total oblivion that her dream of being a star died long ago, is seductive and wild. But she also acts like a petulant five-year-old and, as we are presented this story from Kay's perspective, Sweetie is presented as a tormentor of souls; in a brief flashback, we see only Gordon fawning over Dawn, but no younger Kay nor Flo. One cannot argue, though, that this middle-aged, spike-haired Loki sows a certain level of peevish disruption among the other characters, most notably in Louis, who, suddenly sharing living space with someone with a sexual appetite, finds his own sex drive reawakened, further straining his and Kay's relationship.

Yet Campion gives us enough space to draw our own conclusions about Sweetie. Kay, unsympathetic, cold and demonstrably selfish -- she tore apart a seemingly healthy relationship just because an old bat read her tea leaves -- is not exactly an ideal person herself, and Sweetie's actions betray as much psychological imbalance as Kay with her paranoia and superstition. When Kay at last tires of Sweetie's hellraising antics she kicks her sister out of the house, and Dawn's reaction is to run to Kay's room and shove Kay's collection of miniature horses into her mouth. It's certainly childish, but when she spits them out we see that the horses were fragile and they've broken, cutting up the roof of her mouth. In that immature tantrum is a very serious will to self-harm, which is revisited at the end when, in protest, she climbs nude into a treehouse and stomps its unstable floor. She's so trapped in a failed childhood that people speak to and about her as if a kid; even Louis, who only just met her, tries to calm a vengeful Kay when Sweetie tears the sleeves off of Kay's blouse. "We've already talked about it," Louis states calmly as if he and Kay were parents discussing their daughter's misbehavior, "and I think she knows what she did is wrong." As much as she is annoying, egomaniacal and borderline psychopathic -- she growls and barks like a dog when angry -- the chief sentiment I felt towards this creature was pity.

But if Sweetie is, by her placement in the title and at the top of the opening credits, the impetus of the film's story and Kay is the true protagonist, then Gordon is the key to unlocking all of this. Clearly he still believes in Dawn, and the scene where he jubilantly encourages Dawn to show off her "chair trick" -- involving her simply standing on a chair, tipping it forward and "riding" it down without falling -- is a moment of pitch-black comedy and a subtle level of psychological horror. The sheer banality of it is funny, as Louis cannot even pretend to care about it and walks away bored. Yet the way that Gordon pushes his daughter to perform this little party trick, and her own excitement at the opportunity to show off, demonstrates how both are trapped in a world of delusion, each unwilling or unable to see the reality of their lives or to inform the other. One night, Kay spots Dawn helping their father bathe, the nonplussed look on all their faces suggesting that sort of thing isn't new and that perhaps none of the have ever heard of an Electra complex. After Kay, Louis and Gordon head to the Outback to reconcile Gordon and Flo, the mother implies to Kay that the reason for their separation was his continued dotage upon Dawn.

I was struck throughout the film by Campion's visual style. For the first 20 minutes or so, I almost expected Sweetie to concern the slow suffocation of middle-class domestication à la American Beauty or its ilk. In reading this description of the plot after Sweetie's arrival, you might expect a searing family docudrama along the lines of, say, Secrets & Lies. But Campion has a decidedly off-kilter style, at least at this stage of her career. In some ways, her use of high, awkward angles, color saturation, and bizarre, depraved dream sequences invokes David Lynch, or at least a mainstream version of the modern David Lynch, who is quite mainstream itself. Thus, I wouldn't call her style surrealistic by a long shot, but at every moment Campion seems to be setting up the story as more a fable than a document of one twisted family. Strangely, the most interesting aspect in her script (co-written with Gerard Lee) is the gaps in narrative: what happened in that 13 months that turned lovesick "destined" lovers into a frigid pair who acted as though they'd been trapped in a loveless marriage for decades? What exactly is the deal with visual flourishes like that odd cowboy dance out where Flo moved for the month? Campion gives us only one flashback, which itself offers no information that cannot be gleaned from the rest of the film and, I suspect, exists only to provide us with an image of the young Dawn to be used at the end of the film. Visually, her most striking element is a number of extreme close-ups that isolate characters, even when they're in the middle of a dialogue.

That isolation adds a larger element to Sweetie's themes, which include a subtle commentary on how negligent or doting parents can affect a child's psyche into adulthood (one could also take from that a more feminist viewpoint of how these two fragile women were warped by the men in their lives). It suggests that these characters, or all of us, can't connect with each other: Kay's frigidity prevents physical connection with Louis, Sweetie's insanity prevents self-awareness which isolates her from others, and Gordon's delusion prevents meaningful connection with any of his family, despite desperately wanting to keep them all together.

Sweetie ends on a tragic note, but one that perhaps signals the potential for change. The death brings out Kay's humanity at last, which she could share with her boyfriend; we see a close-up of Louis' feet, soon joined by Kay's, and the gentle, cautious game of footsie suggests sexual reconciliation. Then the real coda follows, and it's truly one of the creepiest scenes in any film: Gordon has a vision of the young Dawn, singing off-key but adorably so. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this: has Gordon at last seen the real Dawn, the one who never grew up, only more grotesque? Is this what he always saw when he looked at his daughter, incapable of processing that his little angel grew up to be a demon? Is this a hallucination that provides comfort, or is it torture? I don't know, but frankly I can't decide which interpretation disturbs me more. I'm never complaining about my family again.