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Jane Campion – Sweetie (1989)

Posted By: newland

Date: 24 May 2009 19:13:49

Jane Campion – Sweetie (1989)
DVDrip | English | Subtitles: EN, FR, ES (optional) | 1:39:45 | 720x400 | H264 | NTSC 23.97fps | Audio: MP3 - 160kbps | 1.47 GB

Director Jane Campion's 1989 debut feature plumbs the dysfunctional depths of one Australian family. Thin and mousy Kay works in a factory and lives a dreary existence with her well-meaning boyfriend, Louis. One day, her sister Dawn arrives with her so-called manager, Bob. Nicknamed Sweetie, Dawn is everything Kay is not: boisterous, impulsive, and overweight. Kay is consumed with uptight phobias, while Dawn hangs on to her unrealistic childhood dreams of show business. Meanwhile, their parents, Gordon and Flo, are involved in a strange separation. Kay, Louis, and Gordon trick Dawn so they can visit Flo at a ranch in the Australian outback. Everyone gets together back at the family home where Dawn pulls an immature stunt, exposing the psychological realities of the situation.

Though she went on to create a string of brilliant films, Jane Campion will always be remembered for her stunning debut feature, Sweetie, which focuses on the hazardous relationship between the buttoned-down, superstitious Kay and her rampaging, devil-may-care sister, Sweetie –and by extension, their entire family's profoundly rotten roots. A feast of colorful photography and captivating, idiosyncratic characters, Sweetie heralded the emergence of this gifted director as well as the breakthrough of Australian cinema, which would take international film by storm in the nineties. – Criterion

Writer/director Jane Campion garnered worldwide attention at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival with her first full-length feature, the alternately whimsical and disturbing Sweetie. This color-saturated tale of two sisters –the reserved, deliberate Kay (Karen Colston) and the uninhibited, childlike Sweetie (Genevieve Lemon)– divided critics on its release, as it established many of the motifs that Campion would explore in her subsequent successes, An Angel at My Table and The Piano. When the film begins, Kay's sad-sack demeanor and passive behavior appear to be dissolving as she starts to take control of her life –that is, until the younger Sweetie turns up on her doorstep. Lemon's performance is something to behold: she's a pale, fleshy Freudian nightmare in heavy eye makeup, prone to histrionics and sly turns of seduction. Without resorting to textbook feminist indictments of male culture, the film charts the havoc a husband's indifference and a father's misguided attention can play on the emotional development of two very different women. Campion would later use Lemon in The Piano and Holy Smoke. — AMG

Even the title of the film points to this disruption of our involvement in Kay's story: it refers not to Kay but to her sister Dawn, nicknamed Sweetie by their father. And from the title on, Sweetie is both with Kay and looking beyond her to other characters and to other concerns than her emotional conundrums alone. Sweetie herself is a contagious force of disruption. Her arrival on the scene sends the film in new directions, as she derails Kay's narrative and threatens to overwhelm all logic, all propriety, all emotions other than her sheer animalistic appetite and obsessive demand for attention. Ultimately, it is appropriate that it is this character whose name is given to the film as a whole, for the experience of Sweetie is in the end indistinguishable from that of the film itself, which takes us places that are sometimes comical but as often strangely disturbing and even painful. One might even compare Sweetie to another film of female subjectivity wherein the title character is not the protagonist but a force from the past that she must struggle with: Hitchcock's Rebecca, which likewise pictures its heroine as a somewhat repressed figure who is haunted, she thinks, by a rival for attention and must try to affirm herself and define her own future with the man in her life. — Dana Polan