Jane Campion’s been called the best female director in the world. What’s female got to do with it asks LIZZIE FRANCKE finds out what inspires the film-maker
A COUPLE of years ago, a film magazine described Jane Campion as ”unquestionably New Zealand’s top woman director”. It was meant to be a compliment. At the time the director had to her name The Piano (complete with Cannes’s Palme d’Or, and three Oscars), as well as An Angel at My Table, which won the Grand Jury prize at Venice a few years before. Would the same magazine have described Tarantino, at the time of Pulp Fiction, as California’s top male director?
For Campion is one of the few women to leap over the barrier and join the pantheon of great film-makers. The critic David Thomson puts the record straight when he hails Campion as one of the best young directors in the world today.
Indeed, her films stretch the possibilities for cinema – both in terms of visual scope and subject matter. Her first feature, the extraordinary Sweetie, was shot from a host of weird angles, as she surveyed the lives of two sisters from a family whose world was askew.
Dedicating it to her sister Anna, who is herself now a film-maker, she has unnervingly described it as ”loosely autobiographical”. (One suspects this is her own playful, pre-emptive gambit in a climate that attempts to forge connections between a film-maker’s work and personal history). Shot with a garish palette while at the same time affecting a drab realism, Sweetie intended to make one uncomfortable in its bittersweet depiction, particularly its sly intimation of father-daughter incest. Certainly the smart set at Cannes, where it debuted, slammed their seats in disgust, though the more discerning put the film on the map.
Campion’s desire to find poetry in the rawness was evident in her next film, An Angel at My Table, which was unflinching in its depiction of the life of the New Zealand novelist Janet Frame who spent much of her young adulthood in a mental hospital. As with Sweetie, there was a desire to underpin uneasy family relationships, to portray a female wilfulness that had gone awry. Campion’s heroines are women at odds with the world – no more so than with the elective mute Ada in The Piano, or now The Portrait of a Lady’s Isabel Archer, one of 19th-century literature’s most complex heroines.
This complexity is important to Campion. She has little time for traditional costume drama and has dismissed the recent rush of Jane Austen adaptations as ”very soft”. By contrast, she says: James ”is very modern because he’s already tearing apart the fairytale. He’s saying: ‘Be real. Life is hard … No one’s going to get the right person.’ ”
Campion is quick to say what she doesn’t like. Interviews, for example. She doesn’t suffer fools – and the questions irrelevant to her work and life – gladly. She is also highly skilled at steering a conversation in her preferred direction: Henry James, George Eliot, her favourite fictional heroines Isabel and Dorothea Brooke.
Campion’s Portrait explores the darker elements of James’s text as Isabel, a seemingly bold heroine from America, makes her way through a Europe that proves to be a dangerous labyrinth in which she encounters the monstrous as personified by the aesthete Gilbert Osmond. Campion has been a fan of the novel since she was a teenager. Indeed, she seems to see something of herself in the heroine.
For the 20th-century Antipodean, the experience of coming to Europe has been like that of the 19th-century American. Like Isabel, Campion came to Europe as a young woman, living for a while in England and studying art in Italy. She calls it both the best and darkest time of her early life. She talks of the time she was living just outside Venice and a friend was arrested for cocaine trafficking. ”I had no idea that was even going on. I just thought, I’m going to be arrested and put in jail, and no one is going to listen to me.” Her time in Italy, she says, helped her understand Europe’s ”winter spirit”, its darkness. It prepared her for Isabel Archer.
Nicole Kidman, who plays Isabel in Portrait, told Howard Feinstein in a perceptive piece in Vanity Fair: ”I think all that Isabel has experienced Jane has also experienced at some stage in her life. Isabel said that what she wants from life is chances and dangers. And I think that’s also Jane.” Like Isabel Archer, Campion lost a baby. Jasper died when he was 12 days old, just after Campion had won the top prize at Cannes. She says the two experiences taught her a lesson, made her reassess her life. ”The irony of Jasper dying at the moment of winning the Palme d’Or is that you learn that what you want is not always under your control.” Portrait is dedicated to Jasper.
Others have suggested 42-year-old Campion is closer to another of the book’s characters, the manipulative Madame Merle. But the documentary Portrait: Jane Campion and the Portrait of a Lady, made by her friends Peter Long and Kate Ellis, reveals that rather than coercing actors, she wins them round with encouragement, care, hugs a-plenty, and the occasional confrontation (ordering Shelley Winters to stop whingeing).
Darkness, strangeness, madness have always been important to Campion’s vision. Not so much an analysis of strangeness, just an acknowledgement that it is there, stirred in with the apparently normal, inseparable. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that she is now planning to produce, along with husband Colin Englert (a former television reporter and director) and Nicole Kidman, Susanna Moore’s violently erotic novel, In the Cut. Her mother, Edith Campion, has described Jane as idiosyncratic, a mischief-maker, ”with a peculiar eye on the world”. She says: ”If Jane hadn’t done anything I think she might have become a great criminal. She likes to set things into action and see what happens. But, then, that’s rather like being a movie director.”
One might, to be contrary, go back to that film magazine quote and ponder: is it the because Jane Campion is a woman and from the Antipodes that she has fashioned such a unique approach to film? Australia and New Zealand loom large in her films, particularly the latter, which provides the sombre psychic landscape for An Angel at My Table and The Piano.
Campion herself says that New Zealand fashioned her way of seeing. She points to a tiny country on the edge of the world, a country where personal matters are kept personal, a country founded on a Utopian ideal of equality that ended up flattening out difference. Campion talks of the uncelebratory nature of New Zealand. You know, she says, ”they used to have a programme on TV in New Zealand called That’s Fairly Interesting. That’s the title of it. In America, it’s That’s Incredible! New Zealand is really a country of enormous understatement.”
Meanwhile, the young Campion’s imagination was allowed to run riot at a time when Australian cinema was high on the new wave. She evolved as a film-maker during a particularly enlightened period in Australian film-making. In the late 1970s and early 1980s government-funded agencies actively encouraged young women film- makers.
From her early shorts, Campion took a very particular, uncensored slant on what she observed, never shying of the stranger or abject elements of life. In A Girl’s Own Story, a 1960s-set coming-of-age short, pubescent desires turn dangerous as a brother and sister experiment with each other. When she made her first featurette, Two Friends, for Australian TV, Campion turned story-telling inside out as she ran back to front the tale of two schoolmates who fall out, with the film starting at the final bust-up.
Her pursuit of new ways of seeing things is no less evident than with her version of James’s The Portrait of a Lady, her first film to be shot in Europe. I say version, since this film spikes expectations of the literary adaptation genre. Campion’s movie is like an intense, intimate reading that explores the darker elements of James’s text.
”What I love about James is that he plots a life in terms of the spiritual journey as much as anything else,” explains Campion. ”Isabel Archer starts out on a false journey – in the pursuit of worldly knowledge, and she can’t even imagine what it is she wants to be knowing and learning. What she does find out is who she is.” Campion identifies closely with Isabel’s journey. ”I really love Europe. But I tried to live in England and got very depressed. I began to wonder whether it was something to do with my relationship with the sky. One can have a very psychic relationship with the sky.” In this, she says, she is very much an island girl.
Indeed, one thinks of her as wild to nature, and fearless. She strips through the heavy undergrowth of emotions, uprooting the primal even in the poised milieu of James’s novel. In Portrait, drawing-rooms become bloody battlegrounds. Once again, Campion has reshaped our perception of the world.