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Clip description
Angela Elliot (Sue Collie) waits for an important phone call. Ed Turnbury (David Benton) irons his shirts and remembers his footballing days.
Curator’s notes
Jane Campion and co-writer Gerard Lee’s ‘passionless moments’ are incidental, banal, idle and largely inconsequential, flying in the face of dramatic tradition. Nonetheless they tap into the human condition, exploring memory, imagination, thought processes, idle flights of fancy, solitude and boredom. These moments are funny but also a little melancholy.
Both script and camera play with narrative point of view, combining a tone of detached observation with an intimate awareness of a character’s internal states. The narrator’s voice is cool and methodical as he describes Ed and Angela’s idle imaginings. Shots of a pig in the first ‘moment’, and of a football team in the second, illustrate these very literally. With these abrupt, funny and rather surreal juxtapositions Campion further toys with the audience’s perspective.
