Jane Campion gives difficult women time to be understood without requiring them to become agreeable. We value her patience and her attention to gesture, though the telling can be uneven when she moves between episodes too quickly.
Fi1m perspective
In An Angel at My Table (1990), a child’s embarrassment is allowed to last long enough for us to feel how hard being among other people can be. We were moved by Alexia Keogh’s young Janet Frame because Campion takes that discomfort seriously, rather than hurrying towards the writer she will become. There is no demand that Janet charm us before we spend time with her. Campion makes her intelligence and her awkwardness equally worth watching. This is the work that makes us recommend her so warmly.
Screenwriter Laura Jones, adapting Frame’s autobiographies, helps by refusing to make every incident announce its importance. Campion gives childhood anxiety the attention a more conventional biography might reserve for a decisive achievement, and lets humour prevent the solemnity from becoming oppressive. The casting of Keogh and Karen Fergusson, who plays Janet in adolescence, sustains a recognisable watchfulness without making one performance a copy of the other. Our reservation is with the brief episodes: some finish just as we have begun to settle into them. We want to stay longer with these people, which makes the interruption frustrating.
Her feature debut, Sweetie (1989), had already put unconventional women and family life at the centre. The Piano (1993) brought international recognition, pursuing her interest in desire through performance and images. Those concerns persist, but her patience with a character does not always make for a persuasive story. The plotting of The Portrait of a Lady (1996) can feel contrived, despite its sustained interest in a woman’s independence.
Bright Star (2009) keeps that interest in female experience within an intimate period romance. With writer and co-director Gerard Lee, she takes it into crime drama in Top of the Lake (2013). Her return to features, The Power of the Dog (2021), turns to masculinity and repressed desire, with landscape again helping to tell the story. Give An Angel at My Table an evening when there is no need to hurry.
Biography
Jane Campion is a New Zealand film director and screenwriter. She graduated with a BA in anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington in 1975 and a BA in art from Sydney College of the Arts in 1979, before attending the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
Her feature debut was Sweetie (1989). She directed An Angel at My Table (1990) and wrote and directed The Piano (1993), which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Later films include The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke (1999), In the Cut (2003), Bright Star (2009) and The Power of the Dog (2021), for which she received a second Academy Award. She co-created the television series Top of the Lake (2013).
Campion was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2016 for services to film.
