![]() Moreover, like Campion’s other features, it begins with a sense of the inevitability-for this woman, at least-of a heterosexual encounter (a fortune-teller tells Kay that she is destined to find romance with a man with a question mark on his forehead). ![]() On the one hand, looking forward to the later films, Sweetie appears to stay close to its protagonist, Kay, and narrates much of its action from her point of view. Sweetie, in fact, can be seen as a bridge between Campion’s tentative, probing film school works and her subsequent features, anticipating the later films’ intense focus on single female characters in emotional crisis while retaining the visual inventiveness, and some of the narrative fragmentation, of the shorts. Made while she was a student at the prestigious Australian Film Television and Radio School, they are marked by a distinctive, often wacky visual style, one that her first feature, Sweetie (1989), shares. But all of Campion’s features offer versions of this story, as if each were a piece in an overall experiment in which Campion was testing how women wend their way through the thorny terrain of heterosexual desire and dread.Įlements of this story line appear even in Campion’s earliest shorts, although these works- An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982), Passionless Moments (1983), and A Girl’s Own Story (1983)-are also unique experiments, and not just in their form and youthfulness. Most famous is The Piano (1993), with its gothic narrative of a woman trapped in an empty marriage who is given new direction in life through an intense erotic encounter. ![]() In her feature films, she homes in on the subjectivity of one woman, chronicling how, for better or worse, she finds her life irrevocably changed by a strong (but ultimately sensitive) man. ![]() As it has evolved, Jane Campion’s body of work has come increasingly to exhibit a powerful unity, centered on a commitment to depicting the psychosexual realities of women’s lives. ![]()
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