Sweetie

Its title notwithstanding, Sweetie is quite a tart little thing. Hailing from Australia, or from some corner of purgatory, this is a movie that seeks to out-weird the wiggiest imaginings of a David Lynch. You thought Blue Velvet was strange? Meet Sweetie.

The opening reels of first-time feature director Jane Campion’s film are breathtakingly understated and bizarre. A dour young woman named Kay (Karen Colston) has her fortune told: She is destined to find her mate in a man with a question mark on his face. Later, she looks at Louis (Tom Lycos) and realizes that a curl of his hair ends just above a mole on his forehead. A question mark. So she tackles him in a parking garage and that is that.

Later, when they are living together, Louis gives Kay a pathetic little tree for their back yard. She is bugged by trees and gets up in the night and tears the sapling out by its roots. From then on, their relationship worsens; she moves into another room in the house and tries to gloss over the problems by suggesting, “We’re probably just going through a non-sex phase.”

But the arrival of her sister (Genevieve Lemon), a heftily scaled terror who is known either as Dawn or as Sweetie, really sends the household into turmoil. Sweetie has brought her “producer,” a hilariously sluggish dolt (Michael Lake) who is supposedly working on ways to break Sweetie into show business.

And if that’s not enough, the girls’ middle-aged father (Jon Darling) arrives, having just been abandoned by his wife, who has gone into the outback to live with Australian cowboys, or “jackaroos.” He still thinks Sweetie is destined for greatness, despite the manifest evidence that suggests her total lack of charm or talent.

There is much grotesquerie along the way, some of which, I think, is entirely for its own sake. Campion obviously has some moviemaking juice, and there’s a lot about this film that’s delightful, in its freakish way.

Its outrageousness gets to be a bit much. At times Campion piles on the absurdity, as though trying to impress the New York reviewers who thrive on this sort of thing – which, judging by the enthusiastic critics’ quotes in the advertising for Sweetie, she seems to have done.

First published in The Herald, March 2, 1990

Not too long after this I saw Campion’s Angel at My Table, and realized this was indeed a major movie talent, but I wish I’d been a little quicker on the uptake here. Not a very impressive review, but it’s not an easy film, either. Also, I hadn’t seen any of Campion’s pre-Sweetie short films yet, and those are remarkable. And what’s up with the potshots at New York reviewers?