Janet Frame alongside the three
different actresses that play her, (l-r) Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, and
Kerry Fox
AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE – made for TV A
Australia New
Zealand Great Britain USA
(157 mi) 1990 d:
Jane Campion
Prospero:
My brave spirit!
Who was so firm, so
constant, that this coil
Would not infect his
reason?
Ariel:
Not a soul
But felt the fever of
the mad and play'd
Some tricks of
desperation.
—Shakespeare, The
Tempest, Act 1 Scene 2, 1611 The
Tempest - Page 397 - Google Books Result
Originally made as a three-part television series, Campion
was initially reluctant to let it be released theatrically, eventually winning
a handful of awards (seven) at the Venice Film Festival in 1990, yet this is
one of the better biopic cinematic experiences, told in three parts, covering
all three in a trilogy of autobiographical volumes by New Zealand writer Janet
Frame, To the Is-land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985),
and a film that defiantly probes underneath the surface of the lead female
character. Given a more modernistic
context in that the film, a collection of various fragments in her life, leads
to a wholistic overall view, as the life of Janet Frame literally materializes
before our eyes, filled with literary passages and extraordinarily subjective
insight, where the film is a profoundly revelatory work that expresses
something close to the depths of the writer’s soul. Reminiscent of an earlier portrayal of
Hollywood actress Frances Farmer in Jessica Lange’s brilliant portrayal in
FRANCES (1982), both women spent years confined to institutions for perceived
mental health issues with a condition that was believed to be incurable,
subject to electric shock treatments and targeted for a recommended lobotomy,
which, viewed in historical hindsight, is one of the cruelest and most
destructive medical procedures mankind ever invented, yet both of these women
came frightfully close to having the procedure.
It was her intimacy of the psychological terrors inflicted on patients
during extensive hospital treatment that led the young artist to examine her
life so closely, finding language for the darkest recesses of her imagination,
exposing what amounts to hidden secrets to the world through an obsession with
the healing power of literature.
Arguably New Zealand’s most distinguished author, Campion, a fellow New
Zealander, fills the screen with indelible images of her own homeland while
scrutinizing Frame’s life with methodical precision. With a screenplay by Laura Jones, who also
wrote the adaptation of the Henry James novel in Campion’s later film with
Nicole Kidman in THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996), this film also has one of the
best uses of music by Don McGlashan which couldn’t be more perfectly integrated
throughout, creating a fragile, sensory experience that is unique to
films. But first and foremost is the
character of Janet Frame, played by three different actresses, Karen Fergusson
as a child, Alexia Keogh as an adolescent, and Kerry Fox as an adult, where
Fox, so brilliant in Patrice Chéreau’s INTIMACY (2001), offers the performance
of her career in her very first role, yet another unique discovery by Campion,
criminally overlooked by the Academy Awards, as she was not even nominated, yet
unlike the character of Sweetie
(1989), whose fierce individuality may have been too toxic for some, Frame’s
vulnerability invites the audience in, allowing us to feel her social anxiety,
hiding recognizable fears and anxieties with an uncomfortable smile, caught out
of sorts, like a deer in the headlights, almost entirely with looks and
gestures, barely uttering a word, as she suffers from extreme sensitivity and
acute shyness, offering an inner narration as a window to her soul where she
becomes socially isolated at college, “Too shy to mix, too scared to enter the
Union building, I was more and more alone, and my only romance was in poetry
and literature.”
The author of twelve novels, three short story collections,
one children’s book, two books of poetry (one published posthumously), and
three volumes of autobiography, Frame grew up in the South Island of New
Zealand in dire poverty, the second daughter in a family of four girls and a
boy, where her father was a railroad engineer, and though he kept his job
during the depression years of the 1930’s, the family had little money to
spare. In the opening moments viewers
are introduced to a young girl with an explosion of red/orange hair, like the Little Orphan Annie comic strip
character, where it feels like a satiric reference to Campion’s first film
short, AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE — PEEL (1982), where all three characters have
bright red hair, yet there are none of the skewed angles and experimental shots
on display here, instead it’s shot by Stuart Dryburgh in a much more
conventional manner, featuring remarkable landscapes, where humans are dwarfed
by green fields and the grandiosity of the land, made to resemble smaller
creatures. Deprived of material
possessions, there are many family songs in Janet’s childhood that recur later
in the film as familiar musical motifs, such as “Duncan Gray,” a Scottish folk
song heard throughout, an angel at my table YouTube (31 seconds), yet
they play a role early on in contributing to family unity, as Janet seems
content with her warm and loving family.
Perhaps starved for friendship, she steals money to treat her classmates
to gum, yet ends up being branded a thief, made to stand in front of the
blackboard with her back to the class in utter humiliation, which becomes a
personal catastrophe, especially when she’s separated from the rest of the
class and placed with several obviously disabled kids. Scorned and humiliated, perhaps this is a
hint of what’s to come. With four
sisters to a single bed, seen amusingly practicing shifting together, all
turning simultaneously, Janet has a close relationship with her sisters,
reading vociferously, comparing her family to the Brontë sisters, while her
brother developed epileptic seizures and was regularly beaten by her
father. Meeting a friend outside the
family was a revelation, a neighbor girl named Poppy, where the two playfully
re-enacted various abuses they witnessed, violent fathers and puritanically
strict teachers, An Angel at my table YouTube (4:02), yet the
curious way the children are filmed feels almost magical, holding our
spellbound interest with intoxicating musical selections, yet perhaps their
closeness aroused fear in their parents, as Janet’s father forbid them from
seeing one another again. Often framed
in long walks down a lonely highway or through sheep-ridden acres of farmland,
her awkwardness increased during puberty, becoming embarrassed by her unruly
red hair and her decayed teeth. Things
only got worse when her eldest sister Myrtle drowned in a local swimming pool,
an event that was preceded by happy events, as the family took photographs on a
family holiday, yet when looking at them afterwards, the view of Myrtle was
blurred, where she is strangely missing from view, like an ominous omen
announcing her fate.
But it wasn’t until Janet went off to college at the
University of Dunedin, studying to be a teacher, that she found it painfully
shy to interact with the other girls, afraid to enter the student common room,
instead taking refuge in spending her time alone in her room, immersing herself
in a world of imagination and literature in order to escape from reality,
writing poems and short stories, many of which were published in school
publications. Her sister Isabel joined
her at school, yet they were eventually forced to separate, leading to an
existential moment, “So this is how it was, face to face with the future,
living apart from Isabel, pretending that I was not alone, and that teaching is
what I’d longed to do all my life.”
Astoundingly, her sister Isabel drowned shortly thereafter, creating yet
another inexplicable personal loss. When
the day arrived that she should finally stand before a group of young students
as their teacher, with an administrator observing from the back of the
classroom, she froze, once again standing with her back to the class, mirroring
a childhood incident, where the camera’s focus is suddenly on the piece of
chalk in her hand, as if time has stopped, yet the class becomes restless and
uneasy, where she’s forced to excuse herself, leading to the most wondrous
scene of the film, where the exquisite music of Kathleen Ferrier sings
Schubert’s “An die Musik” an angel at my table YouTube (3:38), her favorite composer, as
Janet runs away with tears streaming down her face, unable to contain herself,
finding herself suddenly outside where she is filled with desperation and
anxiety, having what amounts to a nervous breakdown, yet the transcendent voice
of Ferrier, so quietly dramatic, registering such clarity, unmatched tonal
richness, and emotional warmth, holds the screen. Frame’s interior world was collapsing, “I
felt completely isolated. I knew no one
to confide in, to get advice from; and there was nowhere I could go. What, in
all the world, could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I
knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was
wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until
the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated.” It was her writing talent, however, that
brought special attention to her personal life, as she acknowledges in one
paper swallowing a handful of pills in what was probably a suicide
attempt. It was this autobiographical
observation that led one of her college professors to refer her for further
psychiatric examinations where it’s revealed that she’s schizophrenic, perhaps
the singlemost significant event in her life, as she spent the next eight years
drowning in the as yet untold atrocities of the New Zealand mental
institutions, including the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. What follows is an immersion into personal
nightmares and horrors, as she’s thrown in with more seriously disturbed
patients with little to no education, who literally can’t control themselves,
where patients were beaten for bedwetting, who scream and cry out all hours of
the day and night, yet she’s dumped into their presence for what was described
as “a period of rest.” Viewers
immediately recognize the shocking indignity of suddenly descending into
barbaric conditions, yet she was forced to receive more than 200 electric shock
treatments, “each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution.” One of the more ghoulish scenes of the film
is a strange dance party taking place in the asylum, an unsettling moment that
couldn’t feel more twisted.
Recalling in her autobiography, An Angel at My Table, An
Angel at My Table: The Complete Autobiography:
The attitude of those in charge, who
unfortunately wrote the reports and influenced the treatment, was that of
reprimand and punishment, with certain forms of medical treatment being
threatened as punishment for failure to ‘co-operate’ and where ‘not co-operate’
might mean a refusal to obey an order, say, to go to the doorless lavatories
with six others and urinate in public while suffering verbal abuse by the nurse
for being unwilling. ‘Too fussy are we?
Well, Miss Educated, you’ll learn a thing or two here.
After eight years, with no signs of improvement, Frame was
scheduled for a lobotomy, as even her mother was persuaded to sign the
permission documents, as we see a group of patients wearing head wraps,
presumably those that survived the operation, with orderlies helping them walk the
grounds, but she was only spared the operation at the last minute when her
doctor happened to read in the newspaper that she won a national prize, the
Hubert Church Memorial Award, for her book of short stories, The Lagoon and Other Stories. Astonishingly, at the age of 29, Frame
emerged from this episode with her sanity intact, writing “It is little wonder
that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life.” With the help of Frank Sargeson (Martyn
Sanderson), a gay New Zealand writer of some repute and notoriety, he invited
Frame to come live in a trailer on his grounds, allowing her to write in
solitude, where she immediately set to work on Owls Do Cry, her first published novel in 1957, which surprised
them both by being immediately published.
Receiving a grant for her artistic work, she travels to London and Spain
as a published author, yet her humility is at the heart of her appeal,
described by Campion as “an unremarkable heroine who allowed people to
experience their own vulnerability.”
Through various travails, her reservation gets lost in the mail and she
loses her luggage, among other things, yet she remains isolated, spending much
of her time in her room, where the tone shifts from absurd comedy, especially
in the form of Patrick (David Letch), a bigoted Irish tenant who tries to
school her on the ways of the world, repeatedly asking if she’s “fancy-free,”
still a virgin, thinking he’s being romantically protective, to the strangeness
of the Spanish women who are forever scrubbing the floors and cleaning their
building, surrounded by religious icons, while spreading gossip about this
hopelessly “fallen” woman, to the inhibitions of free-wheeling 50’s tourists
traveling through Europe, where she discovers her first love affair with an
American history professor, taking a break from writing, where her passions are
beautifully expressed by swimming nude in the open sea, but alas, he must
return to America for the fall term once summer is over. While the film accentuates the romantic
backdrop of a small, Spanish coastal town, it also addresses her very real
fears when she’s left pregnant and alone, without the man ever knowing, where
in an excruciatingly sad scene she loses the baby, adding a female dimension on
the summer holiday that most films never explore. Elevated feelings of anxiety lead to a
voluntary hospitalization in London, where she’s surprised to learn, “Finally
it was discovered that I never suffered from schizophrenia. At first the truth seemed more terrifying
than the lie. How could I now ask for
help when there was nothing wrong with me?”
What she was experiencing was the residual effects from the many years
of electric shock treatments, as it takes years for the body to calm down
afterwards. This stunning revelation of
an earlier misdiagnosis seems to clear an open path for the rest of her life,
where she was content to simply write.
By the end of the film, she’s a notorious artist that the press wants to
photograph and write stories about, a local celebrity when she returns to her
hometown, and for a very brief moment, even dances the twist, An Angel At My Table End YouTube
(2:14). It should be pointed out that
Kerry Fox is simply phenomenal, onscreen for nearly every shot in the second
half of the film, showing an emotional range that is quite simply breathtaking,
where certainly part of Campion’s unique gift comes in her remarkable talent
for casting. Sensitive and deeply
moving, with only spare use of dialogue, this is a uniquely inventive character
study that doubles as a living novel that develops before our eyes, something
of a delight all the way through, where the uncredited music of a Schubert
sonata, Alfred Brendel Schubert
- Piano Sonata in B Flat Major, D. 960 Second Movement ... YouTube (9:38),
plays throughout, heightening the gravity, as does that original folk theme
played at the outset, An Angel At My
Table (OST) by Don McGlashan on Spotify, adding a solemn grace to the
outstanding artistry onscreen.
