![]() ![]() But her parents - hilarious, helpless sub-bourgeois Aussie caricatures Flo (Dorothy Barry ) and Gordon (Jon Darling) - are self-delusional codependent idiots, but hardly malevolent. We begin with Kay (Karen Colston), a dowdy mega-nerdess with a phobic dread of trees and a catatonic social affect that just screams of a horrific upbringing and family life. The whole movie feels as though it's on the autism spectrum. Sweetie is this sensibility in molten form - it's a surreal family satire conceived and executed as though it's a nasty dream you're having after pigging out all night on Twizzlers, moonshine and mescaline. You never know where she'll head next, but you do know it'll be Campionesque, anthemic and wildly neurotic and swept into an estrogenic whirlwind. It simply did not resemble anyone else's films, and came top-loaded with so much kitschy invention, and exuded such a confrontational attitude, that it seemed to autonomously correct the male-heavy indie film menu, dominated by the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh and Spike Lee, that had just begun to explode during the Reagan administration.Ĭampion has gone on to be an intensely mercurial voice, gaining global props by way of rather abstruse but torrential period melodramas (1993's The Piano and 1996's The Portrait of a Lady), then going screwy with incendiary gender-combat semi-satires like Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003), and then returning to costume drama for perhaps her most fully realized film, the breathtaking (and unjustly neglected) Bright Star (2009). A film designed to befuddle and bedazzle every complacent eyeball, it was also an Australian/New Zealand debut-shot heard round the world, and a vividly committed cataract of feminist filmmaking - we knew right then and there that Campion, whose turf has remained the rebelliously unpredictable psychosexual will of womanhood, was not going anywhere. It was, across the rambunctiously populated indie film landscape as it thrived in the late 1980s, virtually impossible to ignore Jane Campion's Sweetie (1989).
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