Sweetie

Another of the movies that I watched because it was about to expire from the Watch TCM app and because it had an interesting synopsis was Sweetie.

Sweetie was the debut feature film effort by Jane Campion and from the opening credits I got the vibe that it was going to be a bit of a personal story. Kay is a young Australian woman who comes from a working-class background and is in the sort of job that doesn't seem like it would allow one to get very far ahead in life. She meets Louis, who is the boyfriend of somebody else who works in the same building, at least until Louis and Kay start having a relationship. That relationship is a bit volatile, however, because the sex is no good and they have a serious dispute over planting a tree where it's going to have to come down in a decade or two when the roots threaten the foundation.

To be honest, however, it feels as though Kay and Louis could figure out a way to work out their problems and have a modestly happy life together. At least, until Kay's sister Dawn, who has the nickname Sweetie, comes in. I mean, she literally comes in in the sense that Kay returns home one evening to find that Dawn has shown up unannounced, together with her apparent drug-abusing boyfriend Bob. Kay has obviously seen all of this before. Sweetie has some sort of mental illness of the sort that can be more or less kept under control with the right drugs, except that Sweetie doesn't want to take the drugs. Showing up like this with a no-good boyfriend, whom she refers to as her "producer" since she has delusions of being able to make it in some facet of the entertainment world, is the sort of thing a mentally ill person would do.

Not only Kay has seen it, but Kay and Sweetie's parents have seen it as well. Neither of them knows how to handle Sweetie, and whatever they've done for Sweetie, it obviously hasn't been the right thing or else Sweetie wouldn't be horning in on Kay's home with her POS boyfriend. If Kay doesn't know how to deal with it, it's worse for the parents, who have reached the point of a trial separation, with Mom moving out to points further west. Eventually, everybody loads up the family car in search of Mom to try to have some sort of reconciliation with Mom and to see if they can get Sweetie better.

Part of the problem I had with Sweetie is that to me it comes across as another of those movies where none of the characters, with the possible exception of Louis, is particularly sympathetic. The other thing is Jane Campion's direction made me feel like I was watching somebody like David Lynch. A lot of the shots felt highly stylized, with the focus being put on some particular object foregrounded for no good reason until the focus moved to the actual action in the scene. Some people may enjoy this sort of camerawork, but for me it felt like it didn't work here.

Having said that, it is also easy to see that here's a director who had some potential and might be able to go on to bigger things. In Campion's case, she got to direct The Piano, and as a result some are going to want to look at this earlier work. But there are probably dozens of would-be directors out there who made debut movies that don't quite work and then never got the chance to go on to more commercial and successful things.