Long before New Zealand was overrun by hairy-toed, homosocial midgets, director Jane Campion shot An Angel at My Table there. It's a film that plays like a three-sided album, which is not necessarily a bad thing. As ungainly as its protagonist, famed New Zealand novelist Janet Frame, Angel originally aired on New Zealand television in three 50-minute episodes. Then, Campion, who had only Sweetie and some shorts under her belt, edited the narrative down to feature length and took the film to Venice, where it landed her a special jury prize. From there, it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to Keitel's junk, Nic's unfurrowed brow, and, later, Meg's fishlips.
Now Criterion has restored the film to its original 158-minute length. Your pal the cinetrix had never seen this flick on other than VHS. Wow. On DVD, the images that had haunted me for so long are simply staggering.
Before I say anything more about the film, I should cop to a problematic relationship with Campion. For reasons that remain obscure to me, my grad school Intro prof screened Sweetie as an illustration of auteur theory. Fucking Sweetie. OK, he was Australian, and it was nice of him to pick a woman, but this was an intro class--shouldn't he have chosen a more recognizable director with a larger body of work? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Anyhow, compounding my general bewilderment at this selection was my overall physical feebleness at the time. I had just gotten out of the hospital after four fun-filled days of sepsis, soaring fevers, dehydration, and hallucinations a go-go. Which meant the last fucking thing I was prepared to see was an enormous caricature of a woman and a lot of creepy tree-root imagery. I thought I was losing my mind. Maybe that's a compliment to the filmmaker's art, but questioning my sanity was the last thing I needed just then.
But I digress. Angel is just as gorgeous and elliptical and just plain unsettling as Sweetie, but Campion has to color inside the lines more because the story is rooted [there's that word again] in fact. Janet Frame was one of several children born to a railroad worker and his wife. Theirs was a hardscrabble life marked by tragedy. Two of Janet's sisters drowned, in separate incidents, and Frame herself was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and institutionalized for eight years of electroshock therapy. She only narrowly escaped a lobotomy because one of her books won a prestigious prize.
As a story about the life of an artist, Angel is almost too much. But what's rare for a biopic about a writer is the richness of the images. Campion leads us through Frame's life in a series of striking,
impressionistic interludes that capture the effect of reading her prose, but the narrative is never reduced to mere picture
postcards. It would have been difficult to do so. Frame was a plain, plump person and very much alive when the film was shot. Her only extraordinary outward feature was bright red curly hair that haloed her round face. Campion builds the film's mise-en-scene around it.
The childhood sequences set in New Zealand usually receive the bulk of rhapsodic prose, but what I had remembered from long ago that thrilled me still happens later. Janet travels to Europe on a literary grant and eventually settles in a sun-bleached stretch of Ibiza to write and, finally, fall in love. Campion strips away unnecessary detail until only the red of Frame's hair, the blue of the ocean, and the stark white of the buildings remain. This spare landscape allows Janet to grow up in a way that the over-the-top verdance and fecundity of New Zealand never could.
A couple weeks back, I posted my "
