CINEMA: Digby Ricci ‘THE pictures painted on the inner eyelids of infants … are not in=20 paste,” Edna St Vincent Millay memorably understates in her=20 poem Intense and Terrible, I Think, Must Be the Loneliness of=20 Infants, and the most impressive achievement of Peter Jackson’s=20 remarkable Heavenly Creatures is the union of frenzy,=20 sensuousness, picturebook colour and terror with which it renders=20 the fantasy world of the two youthful murderesses, working-class=20 Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) and affluent, upper-middle- class Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet). Overheatedly imaginative, and intolerantly dismissive of the=20 mundane yet “bonkers” society of Fifties New Zealand, the two=20 teenagers created a pantheon of their own deities (Mario Lanza,=20 James Mason, and the “hideous” yet alluring Orson Welles) and=20 believed they had found the key to a “fourth world” in which=20 such powers held joyous and splendid sway. The garishness and=20 wonder of their imagined world is unforgettably captured by=20 Jackson’s filming. Zooming and dollying dizzily, Jackson’s camera follows the girls=20 as they bicycle and posture in blazing, autumnal woods, while=20 The Donkey Serenade blares on the soundtrack. When they first=20 enter their “fourth world”, topiary rises from the earth, unicorns=20 * uzzle, and enormous, vivid butterflies flap before them. The=20 plasticine figures of their own “royal family” come to clumsy=20 (often menacing) grey-green life, and, in a sequence just as=20 terrifying and titillating as it should be, the black-and-white=20 image of Orson Welles’ Harry Lime pursues them into Juliet’s=20
For most of Heavenly Creatures, adults are presented from the=20 girls’ perspective as intimidating grotesques, looming in low- angled close-up. Huge lips deliver rebukes, immense eyes narrow=20 or dilate, and, in the sequence in which Pauline loses her=20 virginity, the reddened face of her rather pathetic seducer bobs,=20 balloon-like over her. This depiction of adults as distorted,=20 threatening body parts, rather than human wholes, is admirably=20 reminiscent of the Charles Dickens of Great Expectations and=20 David Copperfield. Brilliantly, Jackson abandons this alienating depiction as we=20 approach the actual “moidering” (to use Pauline’s term) of=20 Honora Reiper, Pauline’s mother. Suddenly, we see a bewildered,=20 concerned, “ordinary” woman, not the monster of the girls’=20 creation, and we realise that Pauline and Juliet do indeed suffer=20 from what their lawyers called “paranoia of the exalted type”.=20 The horror of their action (they battered Honora 45 times with a=20 brick in a stocking) is almost unbearably intensified by the slow=20 tea and walk that precede the murder, and by the earthiness and=20 pathos of Sarah Peirse’s performance as Honora. It is appallingly difficult to portray a murderer without lapsing=20 into hammy excesses, and with the requisite blend of poignancy=20 and menace. Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman succeeded in=20 Compulsion; Anthony Perkins succeeded triumphantly in Psycho;=20 Melanie Lynskey, who can run the gamut from darkly glowering=20 malevolence to pitiful vulnerability, and Kate Winslet, both=20 plummily affected and truly graceful, belong in such august=20 company. Their performances cannot be faulted. Neither can=20 Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, a great film by any standards.