Kay (Karen Colston) is a woman so desperate for guidance in life (or perhaps so completely suggestible) that when her neighbor and part-time amateur tea leaf reader tells her that she is destined to be with a man who has a question mark on his head, she breaks up an engagement over a loose curl hovering ever-so-delicately above a mole on her fiancé Lou’s (Tom Lycos) forehead. Such a setup, steeped in the mystical yet indicative of wickedly comical sensibilities, is hardly what you would expect of the Jane Campion responsible for the likes of The Piano and Top of the Lake. But no one would call her debut feature Sweetie uncharacteristic.
Making the jump from short films to features, Campion filled this tragicomedy with wall-to-wall inventiveness for the sake of inventiveness, the sheer playfulness expected of a first film. And that manifests itself in carefully curated compositions, skewed framing and the characters themselves. Neurotic Kay has nightmares about trees and uproots her garden sapling (Lou’s chosen gauge of their relationship’s health) in a midnight frenzy. Lou, in contrast, is a soft-spoken practitioner of transcendental meditation who barely mentions the fact that Kay has slept in the guest room ever since a brief cold gave her the opportunity for a little freedom in their relationship.
Both are happy simply to call this rocky time a “nonsex phase.” But, as the title suggests, the film abruptly shifts focus from the uptight Kay to her childlike and emotionally unstable sister, Dawn, aka Sweetie (Geneviève Lemon). With the arrival (more accurately, invasion) of Sweetie, the film settles on a more tragic tone and reveals itself to be a much more familiar, if off-kilter story about a dysfunctional family. As female leads in a Campion film go, Kay and Sweetie are just as complex, just as troubled as all the others. The difference here is that the selfish and boisterous Sweetie dominates her sheepish sister, and Kay doesn’t know how to fight back.
Through the cinematography of Sally Bongers, we see a world that is, in every respect, just a little off. Oddly angled shots, especially overhead shots from bedroom ceilings and rooftops, present these settings in ways both familiar and unsettling. And static shots frequently have characters contrasted in the extreme foreground and extreme background yet flattened within the frame, together physically but clearly in different mental spaces. Even the dialogue is delivered in a pseudo-mechanical style, the characters seeming uncertain of their own desires.
In Kay’s world, Campion emphasizes structure within the frame (those regimental lines of her precious porcelain horses), giving us insight into Kay’s ideal rather than her reality. But most striking are the truly comic cutaways peppered throughout, not least at Kay’s mother’s dude ranch. Again, those regimental lines appear, as Kay cuts four cowboys’ hair simultaneously, their chairs aligned diagonally in front of a perfect row of pastel-colored outhouses. But the most bizarre visual non sequitur shows two cowboys practicing their galloping dance steps in unison, their boots kicking up red dust with every step.
Eccentric and quirky only begin to describe this story. Every moment of the film is unexpected, a collection of disjointed and equally “out there” scenes and shots whose patent weirdness recalls David Lynch just as its comic technical sense predates Wes Anderson. Visually, Sweetie is steeped in striking avant-garde imagery. It is dreamy and mystical while maintaining a narrative inevitability. For Kay, these events are completely out of her control. From the instigation of her relationship with Lou to Sweetie’s derailment of her life, Kay makes few impactful decisions. Sweetie may be more outlandish than its successors, but Campion’s focus on women’s psychosexual experiences proves ingrained already, here presented with a playfully demented eye.
