[CRITICAL] SWEETIE (1989)

It is better to have watched the four short films of Jane Campion in the preamble to this SWEETIE ; they are a gateway quite necessary to the aesthetic universe and the thematic of the director.

Love, desire, family, madness, nature, fear and dreams intermingle in these portraits that are inseparable from each other, but yet unique. With subtlety, gentleness, but also with frankness and boldness, Jane Campion takes a look without concession on a dysfunctional family and touching. Passing with ease from one character to the other, the filmmaker makes them all crazy in their own way, exploring the question of normality and the relation to the gaze of the other to the inside of this family.

Thanks to the dreams of its characters (and one final fantasy), sessions experimental enable the author to continue the experiences of his shorts. The movie follows, however, a classic narrative and linear and never to allow guess what road will take its protagonists.

Once more, with its five main actors, Jane Campion demonstrates her ability to find talented actors, but also his intelligence and his instincts through their different games. Offering framing original and sublime (especially when travel and the discovery of the back country) the director surprises and dazzles. The whole is magnified by a music that transcends both the image of the director, that the desire of his characters. It will still adhere to the aesthetic of the 80’s of the whole.

In SWEETIE, the archetypes of the male character are transferred to the Woman, and vice versa :

The irascibility, the freedom of choice, the stigma of the other sex, the position of “head of family”… It is here feminine. The submission, the status of an object malleable, vulnerable and dependent, the sensitivity to things… It is a “more masculine”.

Sweetie is thus the personification of these two perceptions. Great protagonist is bipolar, she is both female and male, just as attractive and seductive as ultra-repulsive by his hysteria ; it is also dependent on the feelings, the opinions of others, or economically… as unbridled in his morals and actions. She thus personified by the sex and sensuality, the various desires that underlie each of the other characters, and they get to express otherwise than by the metaphor : the tree uprooted – the roots (the lack of maternal instinct, the desire of family), be buried in the sand (the desire of affection), or surround yourself with a community of men and women objects (the desire… to short – fill the boredom).

A character exciting which gives a different depth to a film that we thought we could label as feminine, feminist, and binary.

“SWEETIE keeps this look authentic and unique that make a subject plain and precious.”

SWEETIE keeps this look authentic and unique that make a subject plain and precious; a work of personal and singular, as in the films of Jane Campion, that in a universe film in which the filmmaker tries to apply his own language : one sees there already the particular sensitivity of the filmmaker vis-à-vis its characters, including the female, a passion for the family picture, in its beauty and in its defects. SWEETIE is a chronic bitter-sweet relationships, sometimes devastating, which traverse this institution, here overtaken by events. It is avoiding its own destruction as it finally collapses, all under the eye soft, and non-whistle-blower, its director.

Written Critique of “six hands”, by Mary, Vivien and Georgeslechameau