![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Een prachtrol van Genevieve Lemon, in haar schattige eighties outfit (zou nu gewoon heel hip zijn, de film doet sowieso jonger aan). Haar zus 'Sweetie' lijdt aan een geestesziekte en is exact wat Kay niet is: extravert, uitbundig. Wellicht symboliseert haar bomenfobie de angst voor de wortels van een grote, hechte familie, iets wat zij dus niet heeft want het gezin waar zij deel van uitmaakt is disfunctioneel en allesbehalve normaal. ![]() In dit geval draait het om de introverte, bijgelovige Kay die bang is voor bomen. Ik deel Campions fascinatie voor de in zichzelf gekeerde, zwijgzame mens/vrouw, levend in een fantasiewereld, een type karakter dat ze ook al zo mooi verbeeldde in films als An Angel at my Table en The Piano. That approach would go on to inform her later work, including 1993’s stunning The Piano and TV’s Top of the Lake.Onmiskenbaar een Jane Campion (het overdadige bloemetjesbehang), maar nu met een John Waters-achtige vibe, in die zin dat iedereen zich een beetje gek gedraagt. Campion offsets what could have been a morose drama with an atmosphere that becomes increasingly, and unnervingly, mystical. The world of Sweetie – a beautifully strange and compelling film debut – is bent out of shape with almost intangibly subtle precision. There’s even a dancing cowboy scene that wouldn’t look out of place in a David Lynch movie. The cast deliver their lines a beat or two slower than they ought to, as if they are constantly in a state of waking up. The film is full of prosaic things made to look strange (flowery carpet, broken china horse statues, sleeping bags, garden hoses) in a manner that creeps up on you like a dream. Lemon’s performance teases those contradictions out, like she too is slowly coming to terms with who Sweetie is.Īn image early of a tumbledown clothes line and a tree planted in place of its base sums up Campion’s mysterious visual style, which exists in a sort of waking life: capturing things that are real but don’t quite seem there, or things that are there but don’t quite seem real. Loud and flamboyant, with a blinkered view of the world that suggests a chronic but unintentional selfishness, she is both misunderstood and impossible to understand. She’s a big kid, equally vulnerable and unreasonable, as much a free spirit as a burden to the people around her. Interpersonal dramas intersect in various ways but everybody has problems with Sweetie. “I just want everybody to be together,” he blubbers, breaking down in a car after his wife leaves him. Their sensitive and emotional father, Gordon (Jon Darling), is the film’s real sweetie, but like all the principal characters he’s not given an easy time. Kay returns home to find the house has been broken into and Dawn, aka Sweetie, an aspiring actress/performer, lying in bed with her “producer”, a grubby stoner whose professionalism (or lack thereof) exists on the same hazy plateau as Raoul Duke’s attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. What initially seems to be a story about a woman trying to escape herself turns out to be more about family when Kay’s mentally unbalanced sister Dawn (Geneviève Lemon) appears. For a while, Campion focuses on Kay and her many idiosyncrasies – trees scare her, because “it’s like they have hidden powers”. She snatches him from his fiancée, they get married and Kay airily talks about the existence of seven tiers of spiritual love and how theirs is near the top. After a tea-leaf specialist tells her she will find true love in a man with a question mark on his face, protagonist Kay (Karen Colston) observes a curl of hair above a mole on the forehead of Louis (Tom Lycos) and is convinced her husband has arrived. Campion set her career in motion with her 1989 feature debut Sweetie, a tragicomedy revolving around a dysfunctional family and a love/hate relationship between two sisters. ![]()
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