SWEETIE
**** (Masterpiece) Directed by Jane Campion With Genevieve Lemon, Karen Colston, Tom Lycos, Dorothy Barry, Jon Darling, Michael Lake, and Andre Pataczek.
Subject: Although Sweetie concludes with the dedication “to my sister,” it is important to note that the film’s story is not at all autobiographical; the character of Sweetie was inspired by a real person, but a man, not a woman, and certainly not a relative of Campion’s. The director’s mother died during the shooting of Sweetie, and when she was still very ill Campion was faced with the possibility of having to turn the film over to another director in order to take care of her. Her sister flew in from England to help out, which allowed Campion to finish the film; thus the dedication.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This is not a family that is ruled by any ordinary sense of courtesy; Sweetie does not even seem to be completely toilet trained, and when sufficiently provoked she is fully capable of barking and snapping at others like a dog. Kay and Sweetie despise one another, and make no effort to hide the fact. When Sweetie makes her first, somewhat belated appearance in the film–turning up with her boyfriend, Bob (Michael Lake), at the house shared by Kay and her boyfriend, Louis (Tom Lycos)–she gets in by breaking the glass window on the front door. Kay initially explains her presence to Louis by saying, “She’s a friend of mine. She’s a bit mental.” When Bob later points out that Sweetie is her sister, Kay retorts, “She was just born–I don’t have anything to do with her.” One of the principal dramatic conflicts in the film concerns the problem of getting Sweetie out of the house so that Kay, Louis, and Gordon can leave on a car trip to visit Flo, who has recently left Gordon in a trial separation in order to cook for cowboys on a ranch some distance away.
Style–the Lynch-pin fallacy: The usual problem for critics confronted with something genuinely new is that, strapped for explanations, formulas, and ready-made labels, they reach out in desperation for reference points that will somehow bring the work safely back to earth, make it seem more familiar and less threatening: in other words, not so new. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that a certain number of lazy critics are throwing up their hands at Sweetie, even if they’re crazy about it, and concluding, in effect, “David Lynch”–simply to stave off the more difficult question of what the film is actually doing.
Transgressiveness: Sweetie definitely has a capacity to divide audiences. It was reportedly both booed and cheered when it premiered in Cannes last year; more recently, its box office showing in New York has not been strong, which suggests that you should probably rush off to see it as soon as possible. I’m tempted to add that people who don’t leave the Fine Arts issuing fanfares–some of whom will be as pissed off as I was after seeing Blue Steel–simply aren’t up to the emotional challenges that the movie offers. The film certainly packs a wallop whether you like it or not (by contrast, for all its pistol-packing phallus worship, Blue Steel is a soggy banana), but if you don’t agree that the best art should drive you up the wall a little, you probably aren’t going to have a very good time with it.
The problem with such a rundown isn’t only that it makes the movie sound even more bonkers than it is, and incoherent to boot; it also deprives the movie of much of its poetic and narrative logic and its sustained emotional continuity–all of which add up to beautifully fluid story telling–by extracting “plot” from a succession of shots. But given Campion’s imagination and energy, virtually each shot in the film is an event in itself, regardless of whether it advances the plot or not. Before Kay visits the fortune teller, for example, an extended tracking shot follows her as she walks down a sidewalk; then a moving shot from her point of view shows her stepping over the sidewalk cracks (which resemble tree roots); then comes a stationary setup that shows her in close-up, looking straight into the camera–an unsettling shift in narrative viewpoint that has nothing to do with the plot per se, but which prepares us for some of the splintered if lucid story telling that follows . . .
(1) Louis spends a lot of time in meditation, and at one point in the story Kay attends a meditation class herself–a gesture that proves abortive, because as she keeps telling her instructor, “I don’t feel anything–it’s not working.” Each time she makes this complaint, the instructor (Charles Abbott), with a rigidly euphoric smile, replies, “OK. Good. Just gently close the eyes.” This glib expression of mechanical validation perfectly catches the tone of such guru patter, parodies the self-containment of Louis that we notice elsewhere in the film, and serves brilliantly to articulate Kay’s own sources of frustration. A subsequent free-form interlude (beginning with a shot of the instructor in color negative, and going on to feature both trees and dancing feet) effectively elaborates upon this moment.
