Jane Campion has both a taste and an aptitude for film topics of a feminist variety. Here, in her second film (following her successful debut with Sweetie), Campion tackles difficult territory indeed: an adaptation of an autobiography written by one the greatest female novelists in the English language, Janet Frame, of New Zealand.

Historical Background: Janet Paterson Frame was a highly regarded novelist and poet from New Zealand, known in equal measure for the quality of her published works and the eccentricities of her personality. She was born August 28th, 1924, in Dunedin, New Zealand, one of six children in a poor family. Her father was a railway engineer. Her unnamed twin died at just two weeks of age. Janet grew up in the town of Oamaru in New Zealand. Janet's sister Myrtle died in a drowning accident when Janet was thirteen. When Janet was twenty-three, another sister Elizabeth died (also by drowning). Her older brother Bruddie was epileptic. Older sister Isabel was pretty, social, and sexually precocious, but Janet was plain, chubby, shy, and sported a dense mop of frizzy red hair. By adolescence, her teeth were rotten and yellowed. She struggled through childhood and her teen years searching for her identity, but succumbing instead to an increasingly pathological shyness. She was introduced to literature by a young friend via Grimm's Fairytales and soon began immersing herself in books at the public library.

After high school, Frame entered the Dunedin Teachers College in 1943. She also took a few courses in English, French, and Psychology at the University of Otago. She worked for a while as a schoolteacher, but found it impossible to socialize with her colleagues. Then, one day when a supervisor was to sit-in on her class, she became so anxious that she froze at the blackboard and finally had to excuse herself from the room. She quit teaching after a year and became the caretaker for some older women. In 1947, she attempted suicide. At the recommendation of a professor, she had herself admitted to Seacliff Mental Hospital. There, she was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and was administered over 200 electro-convulsive shock treatments in a seven year period, in several different psychiatric institutions. She began writing while in the hospital. Her first book, a collection of short stories, was published, by her sister's initiative, in 1951, under the title The Lagoon and Other Stories. The book was later awarded the Hubert Church Memorial Award. By then, Frame had been scheduled for a lobotomy, but the award caused the staff and her family to rethink her situation, in the nick of time.

After release from institutional care, Frame lived, from 1954-5, in a cabin on the property of writer Frank Sargeson, who encouraged her literary efforts. She received a State Literary Fund grant, in 1956, which enabled her to broaden her experience through travel abroad. She spent time in London, Spain, New York, Ibiza, and Andorra. In 1957, she published her first novel, Owls Do Cry, through Pegusus Press in London. Four more novels, between 1961-3, followed. In Spain, she had a brief romance with a man ("Bernhard" in the film) and lost her virginity. Returning to New Zealand, Frame was made the 1965 Burns Fellow at the University of Otago. From 1966-1979, Frame published five more novels, mostly through the publisher, Brazillier, in New York.

At the urging of her psychotherapist, Frame began recording her life experiences in the form of a three-part autobiography. The first portion, To the Is-Land, was published in 1982. Part 2, An Angel at My Table, followed in 1984, and part 3, The Envoy From Mirror City, later in 1984. Frame published her final novel, Carpathians, in 1988. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, in 1989, as the best book of the year. The present film by Jane Campion, based on Frame's autobiography, was made in 1990. Michael King, a noted New Zealand biographer, published a biography of Frame, with her cooperation, in 2000. Frame died in January, 2004 after a five-month battle with acute myeloid leukemia.

The Story: The film is divided into three parts and utilizes three different actresses to capture the different stages in Frame's life. The first segment covers Frame's childhood, illustrating formative events in exhaustive detail. The second part follows Frame from her late teen years, through her brief teaching career, the brutal years in psychiatric hospitals, and the beginnings of her literary career. The last segment follows her maturation as she begins to gain recognition for her literary talents, broadens her horizons in London and Spain, has an affair with an American history professor, and finally settles into a life of creative productivity as a recluse in New Zealand.

Filming an Autobiography: In one sense, it is impossible for a moviemaker to film an autobiography, unless it is his or her own. An autobiography is typically written in the first-person voice, in contrast to biographies, which are typically third-person voice. Therefore, in setting out to adapt Frame's three-part autobiography into a three-part miniseries, Campion had a unique challenge. She met that challenge admirably, maintaining not only good (but not perfect) faithfulness to the particulars of the autobiography but also its perspective. Nothing transpires in the film without Frame's presence. There are no third-person expository comments or elaborations on what we see, so it is entirely Frame's view of things that is presented. Frame wrote her autobiography not so much to reveal the "truth" of her life's story but to have her say – to detail her experiences from her own perspective. Campion studiously avoids "balancing" Frame's autobiographical perspective by drawing on other source materials. On the other hand, Campion acknowledges that she was inspired and motivated, as a girl growing up, by Frame's life-story. Campion's own feel for the autobiographical trilogy can't help but color the nature of the resultant film. This film, in a way, has two voices.

Themes: Although Frame was diagnosed as schizophrenic, in 1947, it later became evident that she suffered from nothing more pathological than an extremity of shyness. The concept of "shyness" is something familiar to everyone. We all recognize its behavioral manifestations but the psychological underpinnings of "shyness" are not nearly so obvious. Frame's life story provides an excellent case history for understanding shyness and its extreme form, social anxiety disorder. A simple but useful way to conceptualize the notion of "shyness" is that it is introversion combined with low self-esteem. Introversion, taken by itself is simply a personality characteristic, and neither better or worse than the opposite, extraversion. Introverts are people who:

• are quiet, reserved and deliberate; believe reflection is important; think carefully before speaking; easily become absorbed in thoughts and ideas; concentrate deeply; and limit their interests but explore deeply
• need time alone to recharge; get agitated without enough time alone; desire private space and time; become drained around large groups of people; dislike attending parties; communicate best one-on-one; are cautious in meeting people; don't share private thoughts readily; and do not enjoy being the center of attention

Extroverts, by contrast are people who:

• are social and outgoing; communicate with excitement and enthusiasm; are interested in external events; engage in lots of activities; prefer oral communication to writing; and respond quickly
• are lonely and restless when not with people; have many friends; talk with friends a lot; draw energy from people; share personal information easily; and love parties

Introverts represent about 25% of the general population but about 60% of so-called "gifted" children. Introverts are often judged pejoratively by extraverts, with application of such terms as "withdrawn," "aloof," "shy," or "loners." Parents and teachers often strive to "teach" introverted children to be more sociable and outgoing. As a result, some introverts become "closeted introverts," learning to mask their natural inclinations in order to better fit in with the dominant extrovert culture. Under the best of circumstances, introverts can be self-sufficient, confident, self-actualizing, and productive. When, however, low self-esteem is added to the introversion equation (either because of efforts to make the person more sociable or for other reasons), the combination may be debilitating, leading to extreme shyness, timidity, withdrawal, dread of doing things in front of others, lack of friends, anxiety, depression, weight loss, sleep disturbances, or drug abuse. The extreme form of shyness is a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, known, these days, as social anxiety disorder (SAD), or, less aptly, social phobia. The lifetime prevalence rate is 13.3%, making it the third most common psychiatric problem. The age of onset is typically mid-teen years and the incidence is about twice as high in females as males. These three items on psychiatric evaluation scales appear to correlate most strongly with SAD:

• being embarrassed or looking stupid are among my worst fears
• fear of embarrassment causes me to avoid doing things or speaking to people
• I avoid activities in which I am the center of attention

Janet Frame exhibited virtually all of the qualities of introversion as well as the pathological extremes created by the addition of low self-esteem. She needed lots of time alone, preferred writing to speaking, formed few deep attachments, became absorbed in ideas, was highly reflective, strongly resisted sharing details about her life (except in writing), and hated being the center of attention. As one illustration of the last of those points, in 1979, Frame was persuaded to attend the Third Conference of the New Zealand Society of Authors. They had given her some help the preceding year, so perhaps she felt obliged. She was to be the guest of honor but showed up late for the first session on Maori and Polynesian writing and sat in the furthest corner of the room by herself. Nevertheless, the chairman of the session, spotting her arrival, welcomed her, and asked the audience to join in a round of applause. When the audience turned their heads toward the far corner of the room, she abruptly got to her feet and fled the room.

In her autobiography, Frame openly and exhaustively writes about the extremity of her shyness, searching to understand it. "My memory of myself," she begins, "contains now myself looking outward and myself looking within from without, developing the view that others might have of me" [To the Is-land, pg. 143]. As a child, and even more as a teen, Frame was preoccupied with how she appeared to others. She was locked in a cycle of self-looking, as though in a mirror, though not in the more familiar narcissistic sense. She gazed at herself as she imagined others were seeing her, not from a vantage point of self-adulation. One can't be a constant spectator of one's self and also develop an internal sense of identity. Frame sometimes wrote of a "homelessness of self." Frame would sometimes actually sit in front of a mirror and try on different poses or identities that she hoped to assume. At one stage, she wanted to be seen as a dreamer, "lost in the poetic world of imagination," as a teacher had observed in relation to an admired classmate, Shirley. Later, after being complemented by a psychology lecturer, John Forrest, for being a good writer, Frame sat in front of her bedroom mirror and repeated, "You have a real talent for writing," while trying to find a pose worthy of the words. Having no interior identity, Frame spent her early life trying to reflect the images provided for her by others, including, at various times, anorexic intellectual, schoolteacher, schizophrenic, mad genius, bohemian writer, fancy-free virgin, and national icon/recluse. She found her one true interior identity as, simply, a writer. Only through rigorous privacy could she be true to her genuine identity.

Production Values: There are perhaps three features of the film Angel at My Table that make it quite distinctive, as films go. One, I've mentioned already: the extent to which Campion has been true to the autobiographical tone of the source material. A second remarkable aspect of the film is Campion's ability to tell the story visually rather than primarily through dialog or voiceover narrative. There are some instances of voiceover narrative and certainly there is also dialog, but most of the significance of various vignettes has to be derived by viewers from the images. For example, there's a scene near the end of the film in which Frame has returned to New Zealand, after her father's death. She finds a pair of his boots, puts her own feet into them, and mimics her father's stance and a hand gesture. In that brief segment, we understand mountains from the images about the importance of Frame's relationship with her father. There's a scene early in the film in which Frame, as a child, is made to stand facing the blackboard, as punishment for lying, thus being humiliated in front of the entire class (the last thing that an introvert needs). Later, we see the adult Frame thrown back to that same moment, as she freezes at the blackboard when the supervisor takes a seat in her classroom.

The third remarkable quality of this film is Campion's use of mirrors and windows. In the theme section, I discussed how Frame explored, in her autobiographies, the problem of being trapped in a self-looking mode. That's a complex idea and not one that would be thought of as especially "cinematic," but Campion makes it cinematic through five mirror episodes scattered through the film. By contrast, windows in this film have another meaning altogether. During those times, in her life, when Frame is functioning most successfully, the camera, in Campion's film, often views Frame in a contained space, either through a window or in front of a window. An extremely shy person functions best when they can operate within a wall of privacy, sending missives out to contact the world, in their own good time. Under that arrangement, the shy person's interior identity is not obliterated by the self-watching induced by presence of too many other people. Thus, Campion has effectively captured not only the formative episodes of Frame's life but the psychological issues as well. For this film, Campion invented a visual language that captures Frame's preoccupation with seeing herself simultaneously from within and without.

Frame's literary works play no direct role in this film. There are no quotes or enactments. Obviously, what made Frame famous was her work as a writer. It is hard to imagine a film being made about an extremely shy and physically unattractive woman unless she had achieved celebrity status in some aspect of her life. Amazingly, this film manages to be both interesting and insightful despite dealing only with the peculiar personal life of Frame rather than with what made her famous and a film-worthy subject.

The cinematography is mostly pale and soft. The camera feasts almost continuously on whichever actress is playing Frame at the moment, but Campion tosses in a few attractive New Zealand vistas and some interesting street scenes in London and Spain. The soundtrack is moody and atmospheric, nicely capturing the emotional quality of the story.

Three different actresses play Janet Frame over the course of the film. It's amazing how similar the three look and how seamlessly the segments dovetail with one another. You have to pay very close attention to notice when the casting transitions occur. Alexia Keogh enchants as Janet in childhood. She looks a bit like a little Orphan Annie. Karen Fergusson went on to assume the role for the teen years. Then Kerry Fox gives a vivid and powerful performance of the adult Frame. The whole thing seems so natural and unaffected that the film sometimes comes across as a documentary of Frame's life. Kerry Fox's other professional work includes parts in The Last Day's of Chez Nous (1993), Shallow Grave (1994), and The Hanging Garden (1998).

Bottom-Line: From the point of view of artistic integrity and artful cinematic treatment of an autobiographical source, this film is quite simply a masterpiece. It's obvious that Campion had a substantial emotional investment in this film and its subject. The film won numerous awards at film festivals, including the festivals in Venice and New York. Shortly after completing this film, Campion turned to one of her best films to date, The Piano (1993). I have to imagine that a substantial majority of film viewers will find An Angel at My Table too long, too slow, and too dull. Janet Frame's life story is not going to be entertaining to the clientele that turns out for, say, Road Warrior. If you're looking for face-paced entertainment, you won't find it here. I'm going to give the film four-stars so as not to overstate its potential appeal for a general audience. I especially recommend the film, however, for feminists, people with an interest in Frame or her novels, people interested in the artistic challenges that arise in relation to film biographies, and introverts and shy people of either gender.

Recommended:
Yes

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