Blu-Ray Review: Jane Campion’s ‘Sweetie’ Continues to Tantalize, Provoke

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CHICAGO – “Excuse me, I don’t feel anything,” announces the young, saucer-eyed woman to her meditation instructor. In fact, she feels many things, though meditative tranquility is not among them. Whenever she closes her eyes, a series of nightmarish images emerge from the depths of her heightened paranoia. At the center of her fears is a dark force in the form of her sister, lovingly nicknamed, “Sweetie.”

Though Kay (Karen Colson) is technically the heart and soul of this potent 1989 drama, her troubled, titular sibling, carrying the birth name of Dawn (Geneviève Lemon), soaks up attention like a sponge. Her unrestrained flamboyance and untreated mental illness threatens to consume everyone and everything that falls into her orbit. Kay’s irrational fear of trees seems to be symbolic of the family roots that run deep, entangling her limbs and stunting her growth.

HollywoodChicago.com Blu-Ray Rating: 4.5/5.0
Blu-Ray Rating: 4.5/5.0

“Sweetie” marks the feature filmmaking debut of Jane Campion, a fascinating experimental auteur perhaps still best known for her 1993 Oscar-winner “The Piano.” Though Campion may have mellowed over the years, her spellbinding 2009 romance, “Bright Star,” proved that she’s still at the top of her game. In contrast, “Sweetie” is a rather youthful film, in terms of its confrontational nature. It’s the sort of uncompromising freshman effort that makes an instant impression, grabbing viewers by the collar and demanding a strong reaction, one way or the other. I found “Sweetie” to be a hugely impressive achievement, albeit a repellant one. The most singularly unsettling aspect of the picture is the refusal of Dawn’s parents to institutionalize their deranged daughter, insisting that her abnormal behavior is strictly “family business.” In the eyes of her parents, Dawn is still the same little girl with the big dreams, the promising talents, and the attention-hogging neediness that consistently causes her to become a handful. As played by Lemon, a frequent Campion collaborator, Dawn is a deeply tragic character, and the abusive neglect of her clueless family is occasionally excruciating to watch.

Andre Pataczek stars in Jane Campion’s Sweetie.
Andre Pataczek stars in Jane Campion’s Sweetie.
Photo credit: The Criterion Collection

What makes the film bearable, and often wonderful, are the stylistic flourishes of cinematographer Sally Bongers and the darkly witty script by Campion and Gerard Lee. There’s a touch of Lynchian surrealism in the film’s use of striking color and off-kilter framing. Campion also shares Lynch’s obsession with finding the grotesque and absurdly fanciful within the wholly mundane. Kay’s relationship with her boyfriend, Louis (Tom Lycos), falters when she becomes so familiar with his body that it begins to feel like that of a sibling. Incestuous undertones resonate on a very real level in scenes between Dawn and her father. Bongers does a marvelous job of externalizing the arrested development of Kay and Dawn, infusing a childlike whimsicality and foreboding forced perspectives into her choice of angles. The cast is uniformly fearless, with Colston and Lemon being the obvious standouts. They manage to create an authentic sibling dynamic even as the plot spirals into chaos. By the time ‘Sweetie” arrives at its torturous climax, the characters’ familial foundation appears to be as unstable as a rickety treehouse.

Sweetie was released on Blu-Ray on April 19, 2011.
Sweetie was released on Blu-Ray on April 19, 2011.
Photo credit: The Criterion Collection

“Sweetie” is presented in 1080p High Definition (with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio), accompanied by the same magnificent extras that were featured on Criterion’s 2006 DVD release. Campion reminisces about her college days with fellow peers Lee and Bongers during the disc’s addictive audio commentary. She admits that Kay’s love story with Louis was based on her own relationship with Lee (who she notes is a spitting image of Lycos). Bongers says that her fear of moving the camera ended up functioning as a strength, allowing her to experiment with angles and create tension within a stationary frame. The director urges aspiring filmmakers to follow their instincts and remember that the best ideas are the ones that can’t be intellectualized. Over the years, Campion admits that she’s become more sensitive to pain. While she strove to expose societal hypocrisy in her youth, Campion says that she’s simply come to expect it. Naked human bodies still continue to fascinate her, and she regrets that they haven’t been featured as much in her recent work. The Cannes premiere of “Sweetie” is likened to a football match, where Campion’s bold female voice was met with an impassioned mixture of cheers and boos.
 
A photo gallery captures exuberant snapshots of the crew during production, while a 22-minute making-of featurette includes delightful retrospective interviews with Colston and Lemon. Though both actresses had trouble fully grasping their characters, they relied on building a scene-by-scene reality for themselves. The largely female crew gave them a sense of security during their more intimate scenes, though Lemon still felt hesitant about shooting the rather revealing finale set in a tree. What makes this disc a vital purchase for any Campion admirer is the inclusion of the director’s acclaimed shorts, along with a 19-minute archival interview about her film school experience. 1982’s Palme d’Or winner, “An Exercise in Discipline - Peel,” offers a striking look at simmering tensions exposed by the most trivial of occurrences. 1984’s “A Girl’s Own Story” paints a haunting portrait of young women teetering on the edge of adulthood, while finding themselves the object of aggressive male lust (it’s here that Campion’s similarities to French filmmaker Catherine Breillat are at their most pronounced). Yet the film that’s quickly become my new obsession is 1983’s “Passionless Moments,” a brilliant series of miniature vignettes detailing the fragility of life’s epiphanies and illusions. My favorite scene involved a misinformed man attempting to reassess why The Monkeys would name a song, “Clear Up, Sleepy Jeans.”

‘Sweetie’ is released by The Criterion Collection and stars Karen Colston, Geneviève Lemon, Tom Lycos, Jon Darling, Dorothy Barry, Michael Lake and Andre Pataczek. It was written by Gerard Lee and Jane Campion and directed by Jane Campion. It was released on April 19, 2011. It is not rated.

HollywoodChicago.com staff writer Matt Fagerholm

By MATT FAGERHOLM
Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
matt@hollywoodchicago.com

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