TWO FRIENDS Movie Review

Louise (Emma Coles) and Kelly (Kris Bidenko) are two 15-year-old girls whose friendship has ended. Both girls had had their wishes come true by being accepted for enrollment at the same prestigious school, but Kelly has been forbidden to attend by her hard-line stepfather, who thinks the girl will become a snob. Jane Campion's 1986 Two Friends would end here, were it not for the fact that she's placed the end of their story at the beginning of her film. As in Harold Pinter's Betrayal (and the Seinfeld episode that lampooned it), Campion then works her way back in time through the friendship's deterioration, showing the girls becoming closer and closer over the course of the previous year, and finally believing themselves inseparable, allowing us—if not her characters—a happy ending. The home lives of the girls are lovingly detailed by the director, who's more interested in the moment-to-moment dynamics of adolescent closeness than in its inevitable dissolution, which may be why she dispenses with any pretense of traditional “suspense” right off the bat. Coles and Bidenko are natural and charming performers, but the quality of the sound recording (filmed on 16mm for television) combined with thick and often mumbled Australian accents, may put some viewers off. Stick with it though, to discover the early, already considerable talents of the director who would startle the cinema world with Sweetie, and create a worldwide phenomenon with The Piano.

NEXT STOP … Sweetie, An Angel at My Table, High Tide (1987)

1986 76m/C AU Kris Bidenko, Emma Coles, Peter Hehir, Kris McQuade; D: Jane Campion; W: Helen Garner; C: Julian Penney; M: Martin Armiger. VHS, Letterbox NYF, MIL