Catherine Fowler

Uncertain, Unusual, and Unruly Women: Jane Campion's Look Askance

In Jane Campion's early film Peel (1982) we encounter a family who have hit breaking point. While the woman sulks in the passenger seat, the man smokes perched on the bumper. Attempting to figure out the impasse between the adults the young boy approaches them one by one, tilts his head to the side and thrusts his face in their face staring intently into their eyes. This look ‘askance' is here literally a ‘sideways' look; however across several of Campion's later films it fulfils its other meanings of a look of ‘suspicion' and ‘doubt'. Trust and certainty are feelings that are painfully absent from the circuit of filial, sibling and sexual relationships that Campion treats in Sweetie (1989), Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003) and instead Campion brings her look askance to bear on the expectations we hold about how sisters, parents and lovers should connect. Why, she seems to ask, should we expect more of our blood relations? What hold do they actually have over us emotionally, physically and mentally? Similarly, what constitutes a sexual relationship? And how does commitment to a lover differ from commitment to family members?

While Campion poses these questions using her look askance, she also relies on a series of unruly heroines who do not act as we or others believe that they should and thereby scatter uncertainty in their wake. The eponymous Sweetie is the most prominent example. In an interview with Michel Ciment Campion revealed: “The character of Sweetie was inspired by a man. For family reasons, we changed the gender.”(Ciment, 1989) Yet Sweetie's unruliness relies implicitly on her transgression of the tight boundaries of correct female behaviour; as a man she would have been unthinkable.

This paper develops Campion's look askance as a distinctive point of view on narrative, characters and the world, that challenges expectations and assumptions and provides us with a sideways glimpse at uncertain, unusual and unruly women.

References

Ciment, Michel. Cannes, 17 May 1989. From Positif January 1990. Translated by Michele Curley. Re-printed in Jane Campion: Interviews . Ed. Virginia Wright Wexman. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 30-44.

Biography

Catherine Fowler has published on Chantal Akerman and women directors, European cinema (ed. The European Cinema Reader (2002), and national (co-ed. with Gillian Helfield Representing the Rural: Space, Place and Identity in Films about the Land (2006), and experimental cinemas. Her book on Sally Potter, Contemporary Directors: Sally Potter, is to be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2007.