July 2005 has ended and along with it my month-long cinematic invasion of Britain. I'm in retreat, though I expect to sally forth to Britain again come September. For a change of pace, I'm devoting the first half of August to an excursion down under. I've got ten of the top Australian films and four from New Zealand stacked up for review. One can't delve very deeply into the cinematic terrain of the nether world without coming across director Jane Campion. I thought I'd start my quest for better understanding of the cinema of the southern hemisphere with Campion's debut feature film, before tackling any of her more recent work.

Historical Background: Jane Campion was born in 1955 in Wellington, New Zealand. She graduated from the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School and garnered attention with her 1982 student project, Peel, which won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. Another of her subsequent shorts, A Girl's Story and Passionless Moments (1984) added to her reputation. The present film, Sweetie (1989), was her first feature-length film, and explored the director's prime topic, family relationships. To call it "offbeat" is really too mild a term. With it, Campion introduced a very distinctive style and garnered reactions ranging from adulation to contempt. Campion next directed An Angel at My Table (1990), a three-hour mini-series adaptation of the autobiography of Janet Frame. Then Campion had her greatest success to date with The Piano (1993), which shared the Golden Palm at Cannes. Campion appears to be working on a rather steady three year schedule, next directing The Portrait of a Lady (1996), starring Nicole Kidman, and then Holy Smoke (1999), with Kate Winslet. In 2003, Campion directed In the Cut, starring Meg Ryan, with Nicole Kidman as one of the two producers. Campion clearly has a bright professional life ahead of her.

The Story: The film opens calmly enough with Kay (Karen Colston) lounging about on her bed, which overlies a floral design carpet. In voiceover narrative, we listen in on Kay's thoughts, which relate to one of her several superstitions. "Trees scare me," she thinks, "They have human powers." She worries about their roots growing wildly beneath the house, with sinister intents. In a few additional vignettes, we observe Kay as a pursed lipped, off-putting, young woman, somewhat attractive but very repressed in her social relationships.

Kay pays a visit to a tealeaf reader, who predicts that Kay will meet a man who will offer a deep relationship. The man has a question mark on his forehead. Soon enough, Kay meets the man with the question mark. A mole on his forehead forms the period while a curled lock of hair provides the rest of the character. That the man, Louis (Tom Lycos), is just now engaged to a co-worker, Cheryl, is irrelevant. In Kay's mind, she and Louis were destined to be together and soon enough they are making love under a car in the parking lot.

Louis and Kay move in together and do well enough at first, but their relationship soon takes a frosty turn. Louis has planted a sapling in the backyard, which ties in with Kay's phobia about trees. After she experiences a nightmare about rapidly spreading roots, she sneaks out in the middle of the night and uproots the seedling. At the same time, Kay closes off her sex life with Louis, first pleading a need for a separate bedroom because of a cold, but then sticking with the arrangement long after the cold has passed.

So, now we've gotten to know Kay, in the film's first half-hour. We see that she is a somewhat neurotic young woman but have no idea why. Enter Dawn, a.k.a. Sweetie (Genevieve Lemon), Kay's younger sister. It turns out that Kay is the relatively sane one of the pair and that much of her psychology is reciprocal to that of Sweetie. Sweetie arrives like a scourge from hell. One day, when Kay comes home from work, Sweetie is suddenly there with her half-dressed, runty boyfriend and "agent," Bob (Michael Lake). He's some kind of drugged-up loser and Sweetie is a grotesque, tubby, hedonist, drowning in mascara, black hair-dye, and black nail polish, who ridiculously images stardom around the corner. In stark contrast to the repressed Kay, Sweetie knows no limits, giving full vent to every hedonistic impulse. At first Kay wants to deny any relationship, telling Louis, "I didn't have anything to do with her. She was just . . . born." Sweetie and Bob engage in sexual calisthenics and help themselves to clothes from the closets of Kay and Louis. During an outing at the beach (without Kay and with Bob buried in the sand), Sweetie offers to lick Louis all over, and starts in. That night, when Louis tries the licking routine on Kay, she complains that it feels like a "big snail crawling up my nightie" and turns away from Louis.

Sweetie, who is off her medication, and Kay are at constant odds with one another, as they must have been all the years when they were growing up. Kay is an orderly, control freak and Sweetie the embodiment of negative entropy. When Sweetie is angry with Kay, she declares, "Now, I'll do something terrible," and proceeds to masticate several of Kay's prized porcelain horses. We meet their father, Gordon (Jon Darling), after he is thrown out by his wife, Flo (Dorothy Barry), who wants to go west for a while and hang out with some cowboys. We discover that Sweetie is her father's little princess. Throughout her childhood, he had envisioned stardom for her. She could do no wrong and was encouraged to show off and take center stage at every opportunity. She's very skilled at keeping herself the center of attention – even if it's negative attention.

Gordon, Kay, and Louis decide to head west in order to try to effect reconciliation between Gordon and Flo. Sweetie is to be left behind, but has to be tricked out of the car, since she is determined to go with them. On a somewhat surreal ranch, the buckaroos dance but seldom speak. Later, back home, Louis, who has stoically borne one abuse after another, discovers that it was Kay who uprooted his sapling. That's the last straw for Louis, who decides to leave Kay and her dysfunctional family behind, declaring, in a grand understatement, "You're abnormal."

Sweetie's acting out escalates and in a fit, she climbs into the tree house, which had long been a locus of contention between the sisters, blackens her naked body with charcoal, and refuses to come down or let anyone come up. This confrontation ultimately culminates in a tragedy, the specifics of which I'll leave for viewers to discover for themselves.

Themes: I'm a little reluctant to throw out my psychoanalytic theories in relation to this film because Campion has intentionally kept the film general enough and ambiguous enough to allow multiple interpretations. I don't find much of what other reviewers have said about the psychological underpinnings of this film very compelling and don't honestly expect that others would find my theories any more self-evident.

All reviewers at least seem to agree that Sweetie is the driving force behind the family's multiplicity of problems. There just aren't enough psychological resources in the family to cope with the psychological drain caused by Sweetie's issues. She's dragging the rest of the family down with her. It's always difficult for a family to deal with a mentally disturbed member, but it is at least possible if the disturbed person is relatively passive and accepts their position as the person in need. If instead, the mentally disturbed person is assertive or aggressive, there is the added risk that the person's mental illness will become the central driving force of the family. That is what has transpired in this highly dysfunctional family. It's the family equivalent of the lunatics running the asylum.

Several reviewers suggest that Sweetie's problem resulted from being "spoiled." It appears that she was the favorite of her parents, probably because she was more lively and extroverted than Kay. Nevertheless, I don't concur with the idea that Sweetie's difficulty is largely attributable to having been doted upon by her parents in childhood. That doting could very well be a factor in Kay's resentment of Sweetie, but Sweetie's mental health problems run much deeper than "being spoiled." Reference is made to Sweetie having discontinued her medication and there are no drugs for "being spoiled." Sweetie has a severe personality disorder and I doubt that any other child rearing approach by her parents would have resulted in a substantially healthier Sweetie at her current age of around thirty. Her parents might have done a better job teaching her about limits, but, otherwise, they seem to have done the best they could. I don't believe that a child is materially damaged when parents have an exaggerated idea regarding the child's level of talent.

The rest of the members of this dysfunctional family are neurotic mainly because their own individual lives have had to be subordinated to Sweetie's aberration. Kay, for example, is repressed precisely because she has observed in her sister where unrestrained impulsivity leads. Sweetie has tormented the other members of her family, not so much by design as by necessity. The parents continued to do the best they could by Sweetie, even at the price of their own mental health and that of Kay. The song that Sweetie sang when she was little, which is shown very near the film's end, includes the line, "Love me with every beat of your heart." Her parents did so, at great personal sacrifice.

Production Values: The screenplay for Sweetie could be characterized as an open-ended exposition. Each set piece within the film adds a little more to the depiction of the characters, yet they never add up to a clear revelation of the nature or causes of the problems. The mysteries are simply laid out for viewers to ponder, but answers are not provided. That's the major reason why every review of this film has its own perspective on what it means. There's plenty to chew on but no pat explanations that stand out as self-evident. Is that ambiguity a strength of the film or a sign that Campion and co-scriptwriter Gerard Lee never figured out where to go with this idea? You tell me!

Campion is dealing here with the murky workings of the human mind and has at least succeeded in capturing the mysterious and shadowy otherworldliness of human psychology. We often don't fully understand why we react the way we do to a situation or how we feel about our siblings or parents, lovers or friends. We sometimes have to settle for vague inklings in relation to our own minds, so why should we have any greater clarity in relation to Kay and Sweetie?

How often do you encounter a film that holds back presenting the title character until the film is a third done? This film does so, and it's a clever and effective device. All her life, Kay has had to contend with Sweetie intruding on her life and psychological space. Now, we viewers get a sense of what Kay has gone through by watching Sweetie intrude on Kay's film. Sweetie steals the focus of attention from Kay, just as she always has.

The visual style of this film is also designed to add to the idea of psychological ambiguities. Cinematographer Sally Bongers has given this film a very unusual look. There are a lot of oblique and low camera angles suggestive of things being just a little off kilter. Events sometimes transpire under a car, a kitchen table, or a restaurant table, each suggestive of subconscious happenings. There are some shots through distorting lenses or with unusual lighting to provide a hint of surrealism. At the same time, many of the shots are supersaturated with color, suggesting elevated emotionality. A lot of the action takes place within tight spaces that seem to constrain psychological as well as physical freedom.

Genevieve Lemon was so effective as the deranged Sweetie that, quite frankly, I hope to never run into her. She made her character so repellant that viewers can't help but feel some of the same urge to flee that Kay must have experienced all of her life. Lemon later appeared in The Piano (1993) and The Well (1999). Karen Colston effectively captured all of the pent-up repression inherent in her character. Jon Darling and Dorothy Barry were suitably neurotic as the parents and Tom Lycos solid as the mistreated Louis.

Bottom-Line: You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your relatives. Having a close relative like Sweetie would be my worst nightmare. I believe that I have the psychological resources to help a friend or relative who could benefit from that help, but I would have very limited capacity to stand by a relative or friend whose mental health problems were insolvable and were tending to drag me down as well.

This film is not very enjoyable to watch. It's quite original, distinctive, and thought provoking, but it's also a psychological grind. I think that it could provide fodder for interesting discussion in a psychology course or a women's studies class. I recommend the film for its cinematic qualities and thematic content, but not for general entertainment.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age