Jane Campion

by D.K. Holm
12/99

Date of birth: 30 April,1954, Wellington, New Zealand.

Tissues, (1981), [short film] An Exercise in Discipline—Peel, (1982), [short film; also writer and editor] Passionless Moments, (1983), [short film; also cinematographer, director, and writer, producer and miscellaneous crew] Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest, (1984), [short] A Girl's Own Story, (1984), [short; also writer] After Hours, (1984), [short; also writer] Two Friends, (1986), [TV movie] Sweetie, (1989), [also writer, casting director] The Audition, (1989), [actress only] An Angel at My Table, (1990), [TV mini series] An Angel at My Table, (1990), The Piano, (1993), [also co-writer] The Portrait of a Lady, (1996), Holy Smoke, (1999), [also CO-writer] Soft Fruit, (1999), [producer only] In the Cut, (2000), [also writer]

f there is less than meets the eye in the relatively short career of Jane Campion, it is not for want of trying. Campion has tackled consistently interesting and unpredictable material, and often employs a dynamic visual style if the material suits it. Her career seems uncommonly blessed: One of her first short films ( Peel ) won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Later, she won an Oscar for her original screenplay, The Piano. Her youth was one surrounded by art and intellectualism. Her father was an opera and theater director and her mother an actress, and Campion herself graduated with a BA in anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, and then got a BA in painting at Sydney College of the Arts in 1979. In the early 1980s she attended the Australian School of Film and Television, and eventually became one of the more significant and controversial of the Australian new wave. Curiously, David Thomson, in his Campion article in the latest edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, makes great play with the idea that Campion is distinctly, even stridently a New Zealander, while not dealing with the fact that she has spent most of her life and career, and received most of her breaks, in Australia.

In fact, it was one of her native New Zealander colleagues who made what might be viewed as the ultimate Campion film, Heavenly Creatures. Peter Jackson's film, based on an actual case of matricide, shares Campion's obsessions: a gimlet eyed view of the middle class family, a retreat by disturbed or lonely girls into a private or alternative world; a secretly held rage; a disparity between what a young girl thinks of herself and the way she appears to the world. It is not difficult to imagine how Campion would have treated her version of this script. She would have painted the family of the young murderers broadly yet sketchily, while emphasizing the profound dignity of the two girls' fictional worlds and special relationships, which would eventually tumble to competition.

It is the very artistry and intellectualism of her background that one might say hobbles Campion's vision. Filled with ideas, her work also seems to lack detail, specifics. Her films continue to feel like the work of an energized grad student, eager to engage, but not quite clear on what she wants to say, or what she is talking about. Her early, short films bear the mark of neophyte enthusiasms, beginner;s film ideas: capturing the "beauty" of the mundane in Passionless Moments, or a family quarrel in Peel. Her first full length work, made for television, has the "big idea" of telling the story of a faltering friendship between two girls backwards. It's a powerful technique, but it has been done before more times than you'd think (Cisson, Pinter, Amis).

With the breakthrough film Sweetie, Campion's vision of the world solidified. She emerged as a poet of family dissolve. Her nuclear units are truly radioactive, sending rays of discomfort, disruption, and despair to all, but especially the most sensitive members of the family. In the core Campion moment, someone is reduced to a trembling hulk, shattered, soiled, ruined.

If An Angel at My Table remains her best film it is because the scope of the true story of author Janet Frame breaks Campion out of her narrow gauge while still retaining the elements that probably true her to the material in the first place (Frame was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic and institutionalized for eight years). The film is rooted in reality, a real person's carefully described struggle. Kerry Fox (the first Cate Blanchett) is marvelous in the role, and one feels Campion's complete engagement with her and the story (Campion did not write the screenplay).

In the movie version, as opposed to TV mini-series, of her story, Frame is told that to be a successful writer she must write a bestseller, material success being equated by the fatuous man who tells her this with artistic triumph. Curiously, the formula prescribed for Frame happened to Campion. Her next film, The Piano, was an international hit and an Oscar winner. But The Piano also highlighted what was ill-conceived in Campion's work. If Angel is psychologically astute, the rest of her films usually contain a significant lacuna or psychological flaw that in the end only confuses the viewer. Why does Sweetie's family not see that she is disturbed? Why does Anna Paquin's character carry the terrible note to exactly the one wrong person to receive it?

And in Holy Smoke why does Ruth Barron (Kate Winslet) find herself attracted to the holy man in India in the first place, yet still have the psychological strength and resilience to ward off the deprogrammer played by Harvey Keitel? Holy Smoke blends Campion's worst excesses with some of her most stunning cinematic moments, beautifully captured by cinematographer Dion Beebe. Again there is a strange eccentric family. Again there is a sensitive member driven nearly mad by their hypocrisy and refusal to see the reality before them. The best in the film is represented by Winslet. Her strength is an inspiration; her performance is of such luminescence that it reaffirms her as the the best, most courageous actress working in the movies today. If there is not as much narrative clarity as one would wish, and if the film favors vague family dynamics over hard-edged political-religious debate between deprogrammer and acolyte, there is also strength granted to Winslet's character. It is as if, looking at the great beauty and dignity that Winslet brings to her performance, Campion in the end did not have the heart to allow the unhappy ending that the material logically demanded, but instead preferred to spare and honor her characters. There is something to be said for that loyalty; but only so much one can make of it.

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