NFSA Restores: Sweetie – 'She's sincerely talented'

Sweetie synopsis 

Kay (Karen Colston) and Sweetie (Geneviève Lemon) are sisters, although Kay wishes they weren’t. Kay is shy, superstitious and sexually repressed. Sweetie is loud, slovenly and may have mental health issues. Her arrival, with a junkie boyfriend (Michael Lake), disrupts Kay’s attempts to live a normal life with her new boyfriend Louis (Tom Lycos). Things get worse when Kay’s father Gordon (Jon Darling) arrives, after his wife (Dorothy Barry) has left him. The closer they all are to each other, the quicker they start to fall apart.

Sweetie curator's notes

Sweetie was Jane Campion’s first feature film after a series of prestigious shorts and it continued her development of a quirky personal style. It didn’t look like any other Australian films of the late 1980s, and it was more than odd in its concerns. Campion’s later films gave us a series of troubled women whom the rest of the world thought mad (in The Piano and Angel at My Table), but in Sweetie, everyone really is mad, or close to.

The film lays out a continuum of oddness, from the gregarious little boy next door who hurls himself into a tiny rubber pool, to Sweetie’s full-on raving episodes, which may or may not be truly psychotic. Much of the trouble in the family seems to be psychosexual, stemming from the father. There may have been incest, which might explain Sweetie’s hostility towards him, and Kay’s sexual timidity – but Campion never makes it too clear. Ambiguity is her preferred method, and Sweetie works superbly as a destabilised narrative because of it. It’s not just the framing, the odd angles, the wide lenses – it’s the free approach to storytelling, as in the strange and lyrical outback scenes, when Kay, Louis and Gordon take off in the car to get away from Sweetie. On an outback station where Kay’s mother Flo (Dorothy Barry) is a cook, Campion gives us a series of short scenes that suggest a whole different life is possible for these characters – this is a place where people sing and dance, and swim in beautiful rivers. It’s still another weird existence, and it doesn’t suit everyone, but it does suit the women in the story. In Campion’s films, a central question is always about where a woman can finally be happy, and herself.

Notes by Paul Byrnes

Education notes

This clip shows the quirky relationships between Gordon (Jon Darling) and his daughters, Kay (Karen Colston) and Sweetie (Geneviève Lemon), and between his daughters and their partners. After Sweetie’s attention-seeking performance in the kitchen and the discomforting way she introduces her boyfriend Bob (Michael Lake) to Gordon, Kay and her partner Louis (Tom Lycos) tell Gordon of their desire to evict Sweetie and ask for his help. Low-key comic performances, a stylised design and idiomatic dialogue contribute to the clip’s black humour.

Educational value points

• Comic and stylised performances can elicit a sense of quirkiness and unease from relatively banal situations. In this clip Gordon and Kay, in particular, act in an understated comic style that makes the ordinary seem odd. This can be seen in the contrast between Gordon’s underplayed acceptance of Sweetie’s antics and his surprise at Kay’s lack of a freezer, in his exaggerated chin stroking when looking at Bob and in Kay’s desperation not to lose Louis’s suit.
• The varied rhythms of the edits reflect different moods in each of the scenes. In the kitchen and bedroom scenes there are eight cuts in total, compared with sixteen in the car scene. The editing in the kitchen and bedroom scenes creates the impression that when Sweetie is nearby things are managed carefully and slowly to keep her passive, while the many rapid cuts between Kay, Louis and Gordon in the car create a sense of urgency about their situation.
• The positioning of the characters in the kitchen scene reveals the nature of their relationships. Gordon is closest to the camera, filling the foreground, and he is placed on the right, open to his daughters on the left, suggesting that he is the dominant figure in the relationships. Gordon’s status is emphasised in the dialogue by Sweetie’s need for approval and Kay’s desire to please him; Sweetie, in hovering over and around Kay, is portrayed as the dominant sister.
• Director Jane Campion uses a highly saturated colour palette to create an offbeat quality and to represent the characters’ emotional states. Saturated colour refers to a stylised, full and rich colour palette and is exemplified here by the odd mix of teal, yellow and white exposed by a flood of light through the windows in the opening scene. Colour is used to imbue the settings with distinctive atmospheres that mirror the family’s eccentricities.
• The audible and visual presence of rain in this clip subtly reinforces the enmeshment of the family. Throughout the clip the sound of rain can be heard on the roof of the house and the car, and can be seen indirectly on the opaque kitchen windows and in the movement of the car’s wipers. The rain contributes to a sense that the characters are contained in an insular, claustrophobic world.
• In the outdoor scene, the placement of the static camera inside the car creates a sense that the viewer is complicit in the plan to evict Sweetie. In the car scene the camera views each of the characters from a locked-off position in the empty driver’s seat. By maintaining a consistent perspective of the car’s occupants from within the car the film invites the viewer to feel involved in the clandestine conversation.

Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia