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It's the tale of a dysfunctional Aussie family--Mum & Dad (Gordon and Flo) and their two daughters--Kay (Karen Colston) and Dawn (Genevieve Lemon). Kay, a nurse, is a very odd, quiet and withdrawn character. She's terrified of trees and despised by her workmates. Kay and boyfriend, Louis, have serious problems, and Louis is mystified by Kay's sudden recent withdrawal. But when Sweetie arrives on the scene, the root cause of Kay's problem is suddenly clearer. Kay's sister Dawn--also known as "Sweetie" is a perfect horror. Sweetie arrives announced at Kay's house one day, breaks in, and makes herself quite at home. "You stopped taking your medication, didn't you?" asks Kay in frustration, and apparently, Sweetie is unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Sweetie brings along her boyfriend/producer, Bob. Bob is apparently the only person left in the world who believes that Sweetie has talent. But he's under the influence of illegal substances, so he's hardly a reliable source. Sweetie is idolized by her dotty father, and she trades on a childhood skill of stepping off of a chair and tap-dancing. This is supposed to be the great talent that is going to get Sweetie a recording contract.

Sweetie's behaviour may have drawn adoring crowds of relatives in her childhood, but now she's delusional, and destructive. Meanwhile, Sweetie's mother, Flo, unable to take the stress of living under Sweetie's despotic rule, takes a job in the outback as a cook for a ranch full of Jackaroos.

Every family has a "Sweetie." In this film, Sweetie is encouraged in her deviant behaviour by her father--note the bathtub scene. The film reminds me of a sentence from Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" -- "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Sweetie's arrival has serious consequences for everyone, and her presence is sobering. A lifetime of doting parenting catches up with the characters in a catastrophic way. Louis has to take a long hard look at his relationship with Kay, and tells her "illusions don't go away--they become more subtle."

Many of the scenes take on a surreal quality and echo the bizarre nature of life with Sweetie. I've seen this film called a comedy, and it's true that it definitely does have a strong element of black comedy to it. Humour must be a pervasive element in Australian culture, but the story really is too serious to be classified as a comedy. Genevieve Lemon as Sweetie really steals the film with an incredible performance--displacedhuman

pure pleasure
I've seen three Campion movies. It took a long time for me to forgive 'The Piano''s humorless, heavy hands and move on to 'Holy Smoke!'. But HS revealed a comic sensibility that 'The Piano' never suspected. 'Sweetie,' Campion's first feature, is by far my favorite yet.

'Sweetie' is an odd film. Mostly, it's an examination of what it means to be an individual--inside of and outside of the repetitive struggles of family dramas--and the perils and joys of exclusion and elitism. Campion uses her sharp wit to draw blood, and without the comforts of a privileged moral voice (e.g. the competent parent or maternal sufferer of most family dramas), the humor can seem a little mean-spirited at times. But 'Sweetie' tempers its alienated perspective with moments of grace that are as terrifying, joyful and sublime as the dry open spaces of its Australian landscape.

Moving the viewer through a fractured world of beautiful and unsettling images, Sweetie is this director's most richly creative and psychically adventurous work.

family trees
This film is to director Jane Campion's The Piano what David Lynch's Eraserhead is to his The Elephant Man - a personal highly stylised experiment before the challenge of the more conventional big budget assignments that would allow for both a controlling of each director's excesses and a streamlining of their obsessions. The parallel between Lynch and Campion can also be extended to their mutual interest in loners, misfits and eccentrics, and they both treat them with piteous dignity, in much the same way photographer Diane Arbus did for her "freaks". Sweetie is similar to Eraserhead also because it's an endurance test for those who hold a high opinion of each director's later work. The fine line between pleasure and pain can be felt with great artists and their fine line between genius and crud. Campion here uses a song "Love will never let you fall" sung by Tony Backhouse and The Cafe of the Gate of Salvation Choir as a backdrop to her tale of two sisters. Campion dedicates the film to her own sister and the screenplay written by herself and Gerard Lee is based on Campion's idea, so we know this is a personal story. (Campion's sister Anna is now also a director). Campion doesn't introduce the title sister until she has established the nature of the first, Kay, but also we don't fully understand why Kay is the way she is until Sweetie arrives, and is soon followed by their father. Sweetie is a monstrous child/woman but when the arguments between sisters begin it's hard to know whose side to take, since Sweetie makes Kay just as dislikable. Perhaps because Campion knew the narrative could be reduced to the domestic struggle of those tied by blood, she employs an expressionist use of framing where the person on view is placed off centre, as well as stop motion footage of the growth of plants, a montage of the workings of Kay's mind when she attempts meditation, and a flashback to Sweetie as a childhood performer with a growling dog as audience. There are also strangely disturbing images - 2 men dancing together at a cattle station, and Sweetie bathing her father. However, like Lynch, Campion has a wicked sense of humour and the climactic incident in a tree is equally comic, tragic and metaphoric. As the sisters, Karen Colston and Genevieve Lemon are never allowed to become grotesques - they are both given touching breakdown scenes - and Campion appears to have a special gift for handling child actors, with the little boy neighbour and the girl playing Sweetie as a child at the end particularly good. And like Eraserhead, once you manage to adjust yourself to the slow rhythms and lower your too high expectations, you find that Sweetie gets better as it goes along.