Sweetie

In Sweetie, Jane Campion's unsettlingly original, macabrely funny first film, the camera seems to capture its images from never-before-seen angles

Sweetie, Australia, 1989

Director: Jane Campion
Production co: Arenafilm Pty Ltd
Producer: John Maynard
Screenplay: Gerard Lee, Jane Campion, from an original idea by Jane Campion
Photography: Sally Bongers
Editor: Veronika Haussler
Production designer: Peter Harris
Music: Martin Armiger

With: Genevieve Lemon (Sweetie), Karen Colston (Kay), Tom Lycos (Louis), Jon Darling (Gordon), Dorothy Barry (Flo), Michael Lake (Bob), Andre Pataczek (Clayton), Paul Livingston (Mrs Schneller), Charles Abbott (Meditation teacher), Emma Fowler (Little Sweetie)

Festivals: Cannes (In Competition), New York, London 1989

35mm, 101 minutes

Bold and brilliant though they were, nothing in New Zealander, Jane Campion’s short films or her telefeature, Two Friends, prepared us for the uncompromising audacity of her first big screen feature. It’s a family tragedy that’s shot through with black, neurotic comedy and in which we only gradually get to meet the family. When we set out, with the tremulous, uptight Kay, the movie might seem as doleful and emptied out as she is, except that while we’re seeing her we’re also seeing the world through her eyes, and it’s an alarmingly action-packed place. Every startlingly framed frame overflows with life, colour and bizarre, significant, threatening detail. Kay especially dreads trees. She dreams in terror of the subterranean advance of their roots, but even the patterns of the linoleum seem to overwhelm her. As we meet the rest of the family, beginning with her chronologically uninhibited sister, Sweetie, all the emotions, the conflicts and the pure sibling hatred that switched off Kay in the first place flood back into the picture – and the film gets fuller and deeper and richer as it goes. By the time it’s over you might want to watch it over again. Many Australians have been saying that this is “most definitely a New Zealand film”, a despite a lovely dreamlike outback dance sequence, it’s hard to argue. The world the film expresses is dark, precious, incestuous, inarticulate. These are not Australian characteristics, although the humour with which they’re regarded might be. What’s beyond question is that only in Australia could it ever have been possible for Campion to develop the powerful visual eloquence to make this exceptional and unshakeable account of stunted growth. — Bill Gosden

“In Sweetie, Jane Campion's unsettlingly original, macabrely funny first film, the camera seems to capture its images from never-before-seen angles. Everything in the universe Campion has created is just slightly off-kilter, as if the Earth had positioned itself awkwardly beneath your feet. The film's subject is family life, but voices seem to call down from the flowers on the wallpaper, and every crack in the sidewalk threatens danger. It's about family life as Kafka might have viewed it. From its opening shots on, the film unfolds a mood of enveloping peculiarity. In essence, Sweetie is a horror movie; it's about the horror of having relatives who crowd in, wear your clothes, occupy your guest room and, without the slightest urging, attach their lives to yours. Deeper down, though, there's another layer, and this is where Campion is happiest. She likes it when family turbulence is repressed and springs out in freaky new shapes. Campion's style isn't articulate; it's based, in fact, on inexpressiveness, on the thoughts that get tangled up and don't quite work themselves to the surface. Her jokes, too, hit you upside the head, like Freudian snowballs zinging in from nowhere… I loved the way Campion and cinematographer Sally Bongers make the natural and the unnatural (human) landscapes appear lush and supersaturated with color, but at the same time barren, minimalist. Also, a scene in which the jackaroos dance a dusty sunset waltz in the cowboy camp has an almost serene eccentricity. The images imprint themselves instantly into your memory. In making her first film, Campion has done thrillingly atmospheric work, and in the process, established herself as perhaps the most perversely gifted young filmmaker to rise up in years.” — Hal Hinson, The Washington Post, 2 March 1990

Screenings: Sweetie screened on 12 May 2011 supporting Tender is the Night an exhibition at the City Gallery; and on 17 September 2009; and on 12 April 2006 in First Steps, a programme selected by Film Archive CEO Frank Stark, looking at the first features of several well-known NZ directors