“I won’t feel any quiet.”
So says Kay (Karen Colston), the main character in Sweetie, while being sold on the benefits of meditation. It’s going to take a lot more than meditation to ease Kay’s distress.
The feature debut of Jane Campion, who wrote the screenplay with Gerard Lee, Sweetie burrows into Kay’s anxious psyche for its first 30 minutes or so, then pulls out to reveal the familial factors that may be largely responsible: the unhinged, destructive sister (Genevieve Lemon) whom the movie is named after and Kay describes as “a bit mental;” the enabling father (Jon Darling) who still believes Sweetie can be a professional entertainer, despite her habit of nearly biting him while pretending to be a dog; and the wilfully ignorant mother (Dorothy Barry) who just pretends this is all above her pay grade.
It’s dark stuff—including hints of sexual abuse lurking around the edges—but shot through with a giddy wit that never quite crosses over into calculated whimsy. Campion is already clearly too much of an original for that. There isn’t an uninteresting frame here (so many shots look down on the characters from above, including the opening image of Kay’s nyloned legs and purple skirt clashing with the natural floral pattern of her carpeting), as well as a penchant for poetic symbolism (when Kay talks about her fear of trees, because of their invasive roots, Campion cuts away to eerie time-lapse footage of seedlings breaking through asphalt).
Aside from the aesthetic, Sweetie also announced a distinct approach to sexuality onscreen: as something dangerous but alluring, transcendent and mundane, the answer to life’s mysteries and no big deal. At one point Kay visits a woman who reads tea leaves and shares this bit of life advice: “Courage and sex. That’s what love is.” If not, they make for a good early thesis statement for the films of Jane Campion.