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Clip description
Pam (Gabrielle Shornegg) is horrified to see her mother (Colleen Fitzpatrick) and father (Paul Chubb) kiss after a bad argument. Her sister (Joanne Gabbe) teases her as she escapes upstairs. The film ends with a surreal pop video clip, which Pam performs with a group of girls including Stella (Geraldine Haywood) and Gloria (Marina Knight).
Curator’s notes
While Pam appears to accept, to a degree, her father’s open involvement with other women, intimacy between her parents is more than she can bear.
Electric heaters appear throughout the story: characters notice them, talk about them, switch them on and off. Campion’s use of this playfully overt visual metaphor for emotional isolation and a lack of human warmth reaches a surreal climax in this closing song, penned, incidentally, by Campion’s fellow AFTRS student Alex Proyas. It is gloriously strange.
Sudden departures into surreal and dreamlike moments feature in many of Campion’s films, for example An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982), Passionless Moments (1983), Sweetie (1989) and The Portrait of a Lady (1996).
