An Angel At My Table

An Angel at My Table is bound to appeal to audiences seeking an intelligent and compassionate study of a troubled but gifted woman. Campion demonstrates, once again, that she has a special vision of the world.

An Angel at My Table, New Zealand, 1990

Production co: Hibiscus Films
Director: Jane Campion
Producers: Bridget Ikin, John Maynard
Screenplay: Laura Jones, based on the Autobiographies of Janet Frame
Director of photography: Stuart Dryburgh
Camera operator: Allen Guilford
Editor: Veronika Haussler
Casting: Diana Rowan
Production design: Grant Major
Art director: Jackie Gilmore, Grant Major
Costume design: Glenys Jackson
Composer: Don McGlashan
Sound design: John Dennison, Tony Vaccher

With: Kerry Fox (Janet Frame), Alexia Keogh (young Janet), Karen Fergusson (teenage Janet), Iris Chum (Mother), Kevin J. Wilson (Father), Melina Bernecker (Myrtle), Andrew Binns (Bruddie), Glynis Angell (Isabel), Sarah Smuts-Kennedy (June), Martyn Sanderson (Frank Sargeson), David Letch (Patrick), William Brandt (Bernard)

16mm, 162 minutes, PG–Contains coarse language

Watch the trailer for An Angel at My Table (2.1MB; 1.39 minutes)

Awards: NZ Film & Television Awards 1990, Best director (Jane Campion), Best film (Bridget Ikin), Best cinematography (Stuart Dryburgh), Best screenplay (Laura Jones), Best female performance (Kerry Fox), Best performance in a supporting role (Martyn Sanderson). Venice Film Festival 1990, Grand Special Jury Prize, OCIC Award

“... One of the many remarkable elements of this beautiful film is the way the characters, though all based on real people (and approved by Frame herself) seem to have stepped from other Campion films. They have the same sweet eccentricities and sexual and emotional hangups as the characters in Sweetie and the director’s short films. Family scenes are also instantly recognizable as Campion’s work. Above all, a potentially painful and harrowing film is imbued with gentle humour and great compassion, which makes every character (even the unappealing ones) come vividly alive. With no less that 140 speaking parts, the film is perfectly cast, with Fox giving a quite remarkable performance as the adult Janet. Campion constructs the film in a series of short, sometimes elliptical scenes, establishing a situation and then moving briskly on to the next sequence, sometimes skipping over considerable periods of time, but always keeping the narrative lucid... An Angel at My Table is bound to appeal to audiences seeking an intelligent and compassionate study of a troubled but gifted woman. Campion demonstrates, once again, that she has a special vision of the world.” — David Stratton, Variety, 20 June 1990

“Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table tells Janet Frame’s story in a way that I found strangely engrossing from beginning to end. This is not a hyped-up biopic or a soap opera, but simply the record of a life as lived, beginning in childhood with a talented, dreamy girl whose working-class parents loved her, and continuing to follow her as she was gradually shunted by society into a place that almost killed her. Janet is played in the film by three different actresses, who have uncanny physical and personality similarities, and so we get a real sense of a life as it unfolds, as things go wrong and a strong spirit struggles to prevail. The movie opens in prewar New Zealand, a green and comfortable land where Janet's father works for the railroad and she fits comfortably into a family including a brother and two sisters that she adores. She is a funny-looking child, with bad teeth and a mop of unruly scarlet hair, but there is something special about her. She has a poet's imagination, and when she writes a poem for grade school, she is absolutely sure what words she wishes to use, and cannot be persuaded by authority to change one word. She grows up slowly, doesn't date, doesn't have much of a social life. In school, she socializes with the outcasts – the brains, the non-conformists, the arty set – but looks with envy on the popular girls and their boyfriends. It is a world she does not hope to understand. In college, too, she's a loner, shy, keeping to herself, confiding everything to a journal, and then, in her first job as a schoolteacher, she does not join the other teachers for tea because she cannot think of what to say to them. One day the school inspector comes to visit her class, and she freezes up and cannot say anything. She is essentially having a panic attack, but one officious and ignorant diagnosis leads to another and she is committed to a mental home, beginning eight years of unspeakable horror as she is given shock treatments and even threatened with a lobotomy by professionals whose complete ignorance of her condition does not inhibit their cheerful eagerness to deprive her of mind and freedom. Her books help her keep her mind, and eventually help her win her release – her father, cowed by the professionals, vows he will never let her go back to the asylum again – and at last, in her 30s, her true life begins as she gets a grant to study abroad and falls in with a group of bohemian writers and painters in Spain. She even finally loses her virginity, and although she will always be a little odd, a loner, wrapped in a cocoon of privacy, we can see her gradually becoming more comfortable with life... An Angel at My Table ... is told with a clarity and simplicity that is quietly but completely absorbing. Yes, it is visually beautiful, and, yes, it is well-acted, but it doesn't call attention to its qualities. It tells its story calmly and with great attention to human detail and, watching it, I found myself drawn in with a rare intensity.” — Roger Ebert, www.rogerebert.com, 21 June 1991

Screenings: An Angel at My Table has screened in selections made by mediaplex manager Steve Russell (22 August 2004); The Friends of the Film Archive’s season, (20 August 2006); and to honour Arts Foundation Laureate Don McGlashan in the Laureates season 9 May 2007.