Sweetie

Before Jane Campion cemented her global fame with An Angel at My Table (1990) and The Piano (1993), she made a stormy announcement of her talent with this headstrong debut. Stormily is also how the unruly Dawn – nicknamed Sweetie – bursts into the life of her much quieter, but superstitious, sister Kay. When their well-intentioned, divorced father also moves in, the tangles of smouldering neuroses threaten to burst into flames.

Campion puts the theme of the dysfunctional family under a microscope – partly through expressive design and an at times almost surrealist inventiveness. And with a generous helping of irony – for example, a failed meditation. Or Kay’s strange phobia for trees, which suddenly assumes greater significance in the poignant denouement. However challenging the material, it is here we see the sharpness of Campion’s eye for what bubbles beneath the surface of seemingly normal life. A wryly comical yet tender examination of family friction, love and other ineptitudes.

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