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October 21, 2006

Sweetie

In the Quirk

By Andrew

In September, Sundance darling Little Miss Sunshine rose into the Bellingham, WA cinema sky — and the like sun in the arctic, it has resolutely refused to set. The film's quirkiness has been a veritable cash crop for the local independent theater in town, as Bellingham audiences have swarmed to bask in its heart-warming tales of family dysfunction. Perhaps the appeal of the film are its lightweight lessons about the virtues of losing, a feel good salve for liberal conscience in this college-town encroached upon on all sides by our conservative era's vaunting of God and country.

Whatever the reason for its popularity, the film's broad appeal in Bellingham should have been enough to warn me that Lil' Miss would be a fun ride, but altogether a rather tame one. For the most part, it's obvious where the film's plot is headed, and the sex, drugs and death that constitute so many of its punch lines remain safely off-screen. In one scene, for instance, the Lil' Miss family van is pulled over by a police officer; tension mounts because the car has some serious contraband stowed in the trunk. For the sake of the plot — and a joke — the tension is released when the cop stumbles across a loose gay porn mag, gives a guarded but knowing glance, and leaves the potential felons in peace.

There's only one universe where gay porn could be a deterrent — rather than a catalyst — to police scrutiny (in the Southwest, no less). Call it "Galaxy Quirk;" as a well-tread indie film universe, I'm not terribly familiar with it personally (Amelie and Me and You and Everyone We Know are the only two I can think of), but as the few critics hostile to Little Miss Sunshine assure me, it isn't exactly where no movie has gone before (see Jim Ridley's reivew, for instance; or Derek Smith's, which is closer to my own feelings about the film). With the DVD release of Australian auteur Jane Campion's Sweetie (1989), the Criterion Collection has released an older, more unstable star in the same solar system. Like Lil' Miss, the film is a bittersweet portrait of family dysfunction; but unlike Lil' Miss, Campion's characters are more unstable, much less crowd-pleasing, less safe, and for that reason, there's so much more to get out of the film as a whole.

Sweetie introduces us to Kay, a bank clerk in her mid-twenties, and a firm believer in fate — so firm, she enlists the help of an elderly fortune-teller to outline her destiny. The seer's tea-reading announces that Kay will find deep love with a man with a question mark on his face, and in a matter of a few scenes, Kay has found him in Lou: a soft-spoken New Age meditation counselor who talks to Kay of spiritual planes. The film fast-forwards thirteen month's later to find Kay and Lou living together in a slump — a "non-sex phase," one of them calls it — and its clear Kay's belief in fate has immobilized her with a fear of the uncertainty of the future.

Kay has little time to ponder the future, however, as the past quickly - and violently - imposes itself in the form of Dawn, a sister with a history of mental illness and whose nickname, "Sweetie," gives the film its namesake. While Dawn refuses to leave Kay's house, another series of events brings Kay and Dawn's father around as well. We soon learn the moniker of "Sweetie" was bestowed by Dad; Dawn was always a "talented little thing" he insists, explaining his dreams for her in the world of song and dance. "My wife said I put her on a pedestal, but I had to." We learn Dad even built a "Princess Castle" up a tree for Dawn in their backyard, a treehouse that only Dawn could inhabit.

Despite Mom's protests, Dad accommodates nearly every tantrum Dawn throws, and she throws many. To put it in the crudest of Freudian terms, where Kay is all dour, calculating Ego, Dawn is pure Id, perpetually stuck in the developmental stage of beginning her name suggests. For instance, she insists on licking Lou all over, even seconds after learning he's together with Kay. In scenes like these, Sweetie is played fiercely comic, but where Little Miss Sunshine spares us the sex, drugs and death that hover on its margins as punch-lines, Sweetie's dysfunctional quirks are full of sharp edges, and never sanitized. Lil' Miss's quirks accumulate to drive home the point that failure has its own merits; Sweetie's remain as contradictions.

This isn't to say the world of Sweetie is all ambiguity. It's very consciously framed by director Campion, who amplifies the awkwardness of the characters with equally awkward camera angles and staging. Close-ups, for one, are shot so that they isolate the face of the actors against the scenes behind them. Sometimes this becomes a tad stilted, but it all ultimately underlines the mundane, lackadaisical, every-day moments that Kay lives on by giving common elements — brick houses, trees both snarled and hedged, concrete suburbs and wide-open spaces — an often strange, otherworldly feel that deepens the film's meaning. For instance, when Lou upends the laundry clothesline to plant a tree in celebration of their one-year anniversary, Kay endures a nervous fit. Because of the envy and disdain she developed as a child for Dawn's "princess" treehouse, Kay has a serious phobia of trees and the wild directions their roots might grow. She'd rather stick to the mundane — like the fate prescribed by the tea-reading, she likes thing to be predictable — so she continues to hang the laundry, even at the ludicrous angle of the upended clothesline. Laundry becomes so important that when Dawn violates Kay's wardrobe, it's a big deal.

Laundry isn't all Dawn violates, though. Dawn may have qualities Kay severely lacks — like a libido — but her mental illness is not cute or endearing, nor is the way the family handles Dawn's condition: they encourage her fits by pandering to her, creating false illusions to keep her out of their hair (and Dawn is often literally, violently, in Kay's hair). Lou, ever the man with the metaphysical question mark on his head, insists, "Illusions don't go away. They become more subtle. I mean, what's real? It's a big question." A question, in the end, that the family waits too long to answer. Even at the high-pitched moments of crisis, Dad insists "This is family business, and it will be handled by the family." But the enforced illusion of family — the lack of which brings Dad to tears at times — is not the foundation any of them need. Kay's first moment of real concern for her sister comes when it's too late, as their father's pedestal inevitably crashes from beneath Dawn.

While undermining the illusion of the family, one of Sweetie's few weaknesses may be that the story remains relatively "all in the family." Perhaps a better understanding of Australian society would provide me with new insights on the film, but the symbolic motifs of Campion's film — laundry, brick walls, trees, childhood mementos - appear to refer only to the family's dysfunctional dynamics rather than the broader society. Still, a film so centered on female protagonists, especially one that doesn't shudder from (hetero)sexual complexity — which are now established themes running through all of Jane Campion's work — may be enough social significance to ask for in this day and age (which, in my mind, makes Armond White's comparison of Campion to Sofia Coppola's (intentionally?) vapid Marie Antoinette quite inappropriate; really what do the two have in common but for the gender of their characters?). The Criterion disc itself is loaded with more extras than I could handle in one sitting, but full of interviews, commentaries, and short films, it clearly works as an ideal introduction to the Campion's work, which now includes better known pics like The Piano and Holy Smoke.

When Kay returns to the psychic for relationship advice, the psychic gives some surprising advice concerning love. "Courage and sex," she explains. "That's what love is." As definitions of love go, it's a pretty cheap capsule, but it works in terms of the film because it gives Kay a new strategy for life. This is counterintuitive for the psychic, who's work depends on people being willing to believe their fates are written in the stars, but its liberating for Kay, who realizes that the future and all its difficulties — uncertain and unwritten - demand courage to get through. Courage, at last, is a similar requirement for Sweetie — the charms of its story take some work to tease out, especially in its imagery, and the likes of Dawn are never very pleasant. For some people, this might be too much to ask; no matter how quirky it may be, were it to open in Bellingham today, I doubt lines for Sweetie would round-the-bend ala Little Miss Sunshine. But it's also for this reason that viewers will no doubt keep coming back to Sweetie, shiny new Criterion edition and all - and though I'm no psychic, I'd hedge my bets that gives it a staying power Lil' Miss will never have.

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