The DVD version, released by the Criterion Collection includes three of Campion's earlier short films. ![]() In Australian Film, 1978-1994 it is described as 'a ghastly parody of the tyranny of family life'. She came up with the character and she and Gerard Lee started writing in February 1987 and finished in May. Sweetie focuses on the hazardous relationship between the buttoned-down, superstitious Kay and her rampaging, devil-may-care sister, Sweetie-and on their family's profoundly rotten roots. Jane Campion wanted to make a low budget contemporary feature. However, the best of Sweetie's personality persists, as Kay and her parents maintain an image of her in her most accurate form, that of a little girl. They no longer feel manipulated and agitated by her presence. The family appears resolved, no longer scattered. The New Zealand-born director of The Piano talks to Peter Conrad about her forthcoming film, Bright Star, a study of John Keatss final days. Though her family begs her to come down, she refuses, continuing teasing, tormenting and shaking the fort until it falls from the tree, injuring her mother and killing Sweetie. After a series of circular fights (variable rage and delusions, her family's forgiveness, proceeded by her sweetness and fun persona), she finally overextends the limit, stripping off her clothes, painting her body black and bouncing in her childhood tree house. Throughout, Sweetie's physically destructive nature (ruining Kay's clothes, breaking furniture) reflects the inner disruption she has caused her family. Louis, however, has found some freedom from his increasingly disconnected relationship with Kay because Sweetie lives uninhibited, with vigor and emotion (though extreme). Throughout, there are flashbacks of Sweetie dancing, singing and performing small, circus-like tricks with his assistance he wants the family to remain close and dislikes when Kay acts enraged with Sweetie. ![]() Kay's father chooses to ignore most of the erratic, childish behavior (though she has been hospitalized before) because he loves her as a little girl. Criterion Collection Edition 356 Though she went on to create a string of brilliant films, Jane Campion will always be remembered for her stunning debut feature SWEETIE, which focuses on the hazardous relationship between the buttoned-down, superstitious Kay and her rampaging, devil-may-care sister, Sweetie, and on their family’s profoundly rotten roots. Sweetie, from Kay's perspective, is selfish in her severe mental illness. ![]() Kay is quiet and superstitious, loving Louis because of the words of a fortune teller and experiencing deep foreboding towards a tree he attempted to plant in their yard. The film focuses on Kay's relationships with her boyfriend Louis, her parents and her emotionally unhealthy sister, Sweetie. 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.
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