Australian Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows the quirky relationships between Gordon (Jon Darling) and his daughters, Kay (Karen Colston) and Sweetie (Geneviève Lemon), and between his daughters and their partners. After Sweetie’s attention-seeking performance in the kitchen and the discomforting way she introduces her boyfriend Bob (Michael Lake) to Gordon, Kay and her partner Louis (Tom Lycos) tell Gordon of their desire to evict Sweetie and ask for his help. Low-key comic performances, a stylised design and idiomatic dialogue contribute to the clip’s black humour.

Educational value points

• Comic and stylised performances can elicit a sense of quirkiness and unease from relatively banal situations. In this clip Gordon and Kay, in particular, act in an understated comic style that makes the ordinary seem odd. This can be seen in the contrast between Gordon’s underplayed acceptance of Sweetie’s antics and his surprise at Kay’s lack of a freezer, in his exaggerated chin stroking when looking at Bob and in Kay’s desperation not to lose Louis’s suit.

• The varied rhythms of the edits reflect different moods in each of the scenes. In the kitchen and bedroom scenes there are eight cuts in total, compared with sixteen in the car scene. The editing in the kitchen and bedroom scenes creates the impression that when Sweetie is nearby things are managed carefully and slowly to keep her passive, while the many rapid cuts between Kay, Louis and Gordon in the car create a sense of urgency about their situation.

• The positioning of the characters in the kitchen scene reveals the nature of their relationships. Gordon is closest to the camera, filling the foreground, and he is placed on the right, open to his daughters on the left, suggesting that he is the dominant figure in the relationships. Gordon’s status is emphasised in the dialogue by Sweetie’s need for approval and Kay’s desire to please him; Sweetie, in hovering over and around Kay, is portrayed as the dominant sister.

• Director Jane Campion uses a highly saturated colour palette to create an offbeat quality and to represent the characters’ emotional states. Saturated colour refers to a stylised, full and rich colour palette and is exemplified here by the odd mix of teal, yellow and white exposed by a flood of light through the windows in the opening scene. Colour is used to imbue the settings with distinctive atmospheres that mirror the family’s eccentricities.

• The audible and visual presence of rain in this clip subtly reinforces the enmeshment of the family. Throughout the clip the sound of rain can be heard on the roof of the house and the car, and can be seen indirectly on the opaque kitchen windows and in the movement of the car’s wipers. The rain contributes to a sense that the characters are contained in an insular, claustrophobic world.

• In the outdoor scene, the placement of the static camera inside the car creates a sense that the viewer is complicit in the plan to evict Sweetie. In the car scene the camera views each of the characters from a locked-off position in the empty driver’s seat. By maintaining a consistent perspective of the car’s occupants from within the car the film invites the viewer to feel involved in the clandestine conversation.