Sweetie
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL

    It isn't often that we get the chance to see the debut
feature film of a brilliant young woman filmmaker, but there's a
new home video that gives us that opportunity right now.  Jane
Campion is a 34 year-old writer/director from New Zealand, whose
first feature film, "Sweetie," played theaters in the Tampa Bay in
June and is now available in video rental stores.  Campion has
been making films in her native New Zealand since she was a
teenager.  Her 1974 film called "A Girl's Own Story," with its
dark, almost surrealistic, vision of a middle-class New Zealand
nuclear family, is an unmistakable precursor to "Sweetie."  But
with the intervening years and her move to Australia, Campion has
developed into an artist of great depth and humanity, with a
wicked sense of humor, while retaining her own very original and
distinctive style.  Once you have seen a film written and
directed by Jane Campion, you are unlikely to mistake it for
anyone else's work.

     In "Sweetie," Campion is once again taking aim at middle-class
family life "down under."   While the dysfunctional family in
question can only be described as bizarre, I found myself musing
that maybe they only seem so in comparison to the pallid
representations of families we are used to seeing on the screen;
maybe this family is a lot more like real families than most of
us want to admit in public or to ourselves.  Campion doesn't
flinch.  The story is told from the point of view of Kay, the
elder sister, and is about the complex emotional relations in a
family dominated by her "slightly mental" baby sister Dawn--
nicknamed "Sweetie" by her more than slightly doting father.
Growing up in this family has left Kay a serious, capable, rather
spiritual and definitely asensual young woman, with an aversion
to trees, family and otherwise.  When the lover she acquired
because a tea leaf reader convinced her it was fated, plants a
small tree in honor of their first anniversary, it gives Kay
nightmares and she pulls it out by the roots; their sex life
withers like the lifeless tree.  Enter Sweetie, totally sensual,
childish, spoiled, demanding, manipulative and psychotic who
takes over everyone's life.  What happens, and how this plot
resolves itself is anything but predictable, and I won't spoil it
for you.  Suffice to say that Kay, at least, comes out of it as a
healthier more fully human person.

   This is a film that is filled with little satirical portraits
and wonderful visual humor, emphasized by odd camera angles and
distorting lenses.  The pacing is leisurely but not slow.  The
casting, done by Campion herself, couldn't be better and the
acting is uniformly superb. This is a film which deals with the
most profound human failures and tragedies, but from a basically
positive worldview.  Try to imagine the bizarre world of a David
Lynch film but substitute love and respect for human beings in
all their oddness for Lynch's sadistic and violent vision, and
you begin to approach the world of Jane Campion in "Sweetie."  My
advice is, don't miss it.

    For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on
Women and Film.