Jane Campion's first feature film -- also Sally Bongers's first feature film as cinematographer -- is made with the eye of a borderline schizophrenic: off-balance compositions and camera angles unable to differentiate the relative importance of people and mere things. In this, the camera eye is nothing less than an extension of, or projection of, or possibly contagion of, the central core of characters in the film: a very odd family in one of the drabber suburbs of Sydney. (Just when you think you have got a pretty clear picture of how strange the main character, Kay, is, along comes her younger sister, Sweetie, to revise your perspective. Mom and Dad will follow along soon.) Sweetie succeeds in being eccentric in the extreme without being irritating in the least: eccentric by looking deeply into its people; eccentric by adopting their skewed perspective. One could perhaps imagine a movie, and crave a movie, where a similar degree of eccentricity would be reached through characters perceptible at first glance as more "normal." But it's already a small triumph that the abnormality here, such as it is, is not presented clinically and diagnostically in the way of a disease-of-the-week TV movie: there is no outside Voice-of-Authority to straighten things out for us. And the abnormality of this whole family only exaggerates a point in order to emphasize it: anyone seen so deeply into, so intimately into, is bound to be no longer perceptible as "normal." Karen Colston, Genevieve Lemon. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
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