Sweetie Review
Writer/director Jane_Campion garnered worldwide attention at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival with her first full-length feature, the alternately whimsical and disturbing Sweetie. This color-saturated tale of two sisters -- the reserved, deliberate Kay (Karen_Colston) and the uninhibited, childlike Sweetie (Genevieve_Lemon) -- divided critics on its release, as it established many of the motifs that Campion would explore in her subsequent successes, An Angel at My Table and The_Piano. When the film begins, Kay's sad-sack demeanor and passive behavior appear to be dissolving as she starts to take control of her life -- that is, until the younger Sweetie turns up on her doorstep. Lemon's performance is something to behold: She's a pale, fleshy Freudian nightmare in heavy eye makeup, prone to histrionics and sly turns of seduction. Without resorting to textbook feminist indictments of male culture, the film charts the havoc a husband's indifference and a father's misguided attention can play on the emotional development of two very different women. Campion would later use Lemon in The_Piano and Holy_Smoke. Michael Hastings, Rovi
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