SWEETIE Movie Review

Jane Campion's stylized and striking tragicomedy is the story of two sisters—Kay, a withdrawn, nearly paranoid Plain Jane (Karen Colston), and Dawn (Genevieve Lemon in a brave and amazingly effective performance), a manic, corpulent, wildly extroverted misfit who reenters her family's life with a vengeance and turns it upside down. Dawn, who was, and still is, called Sweetie by her family, is both victim and victimizer. She's your worst nightmare of what will become of a “spoiled child,” and she's a monstrously effective but tragically self-destructive manipulator—a certifiable Georgie Minafer without any constraints whatsoever. By the time Sweetie ends up naked in a tree, with her father quietly pleading “Come down from the tree, Sweetie,” the picture has gone through all of its many stages of comedy, melodrama, heartbreak, and simple weirdness, and it achieves at last the dimension of a classic, tragic, emotionally overwhelming fable for our times. Campion, a New Zealand native, has set Sweetie in Australia, and there's something so otherworldly about the country that I doubt that her story—or her comic-book-like, strongly graphic visual style, photographed by Sally Bongers—would make sense in any other location. This is a very upsetting movie, and a fine one.

NEXT STOP … Two Friends, An Angel at My Table, The Magnificent Ambersons

1989 (R) 97m/C AU Genevieve Lemon, Karen Colston, Tom Lycos, Jon Darling, Dorothy Barry, Michael Lake, Andre Pataczek; D: Jane Campion; W: Gerard Lee, Jane Campion; M: Martin Armiger. Nominations: Academy Awards ‘91: Best Foreign-Language Film. VHS, LV ART