Kay and Sweetie are standing in the kitchen. Their dad walks in and places an esky on the table. He sits down at the kitchen table.
Kay Darling Dad, what are you doing?
Sweetie Darling I’m not going back.
Gordon Darling That’s alright.
Sweetie I’m making it, Dad. I’m walking through doors. This time I’m doing it, eh?
Gordon That’s good, Dawn.
Kay Where’s Mum?
Kay sits down at the table. Sweetie walks towards her father.
Sweetie One moment please, sir, and I’ll check on that – remember that, Dad? One moment please, sir, and I’ll check on that.
Gordon I remember it alright.
Sweetie I’ve got a producer this time.
Gordon Oh, that’s good, Dawn. Ah, can you put these in the freezer, Kay?
Kay We don’t have a freezer, Dad.
Gordon What? No freezer? Jeez.
Sweetie leans over the table towards her father.
Sweetie Would you like to be introduced to Bob, Dad?
Gordon Oh, later Dawn. (She exits.) No freezer. Well, I suppose we’d better eat them. There’s a couple of Tuesdays.
Kay Dad, what’s gone wrong?
Gordon Oh, your mother’s left me. I can’t talk about it. I get bad…
Gordon pulls several plates out of the esky. They have food on them and are covered in cling wrap. He slides them across the table to Kay.
Gordon There’s a Saturday and three Wednesdays.
Kay Boy.
Gordon So, Sweetie’s doing alright, hey?
Kay Are you kidding?
Gordon Oh, give her a go, Kay. This could be what we’ve been looking for for her.
Sweetie comes back into the room. She stands behind her father, putting her arms around his neck and wiggling her fingers in front of his face.
Sweetie Come and meet my producer.
Gordon gets up slowly.
Sweetie Come on!
Kay is left sitting at the kitchen table.

Sweetie and her dad stand over a sleeping young man.
Sweetie Shh, he’s asleep.
Sweetie partially lifts the sheet uncovering Bob so her dad can see him.
Sweetie He believes in me and I believe in him.
She covers him up again.

Gordon, Kay and Louis get into a car parked out the front of the house. It’s dark and raining outside.
Kay She’s gotta go, Dad. Him too. I can’t have them here any more.
Louis It is a bit hard, Gordon. I’m trying to run a business from the house.
Kay Get rid of Bob first. Then it’ll be easier. Take him to a restaurant or something and afterwards jump in a cab by yourself. Oh no, I’ve just thought of something.
Louis Yeah?
Kay The suit. We’ve got to get him out of his suit.
Louis Forget the suit.
Kay Lou, your TM suit.
Gordon I thought I brought you kids up to love each other.
Kay It’s a bit hard when she’s in fairyland. ‘One moment please, sir, and I’ll check on that.’ My God, if I hear her say that line one more time I’ll tear her throat out.
Gordon I can’t understand what’s happening. The whole family’s coming apart like a wet paper bag. People like you two don’t appreciate this but the show world is full of unusual types. What’s to say Sweetie’s any more unusual? She’s talented, she’s sincerely talented. You never did appreciate her, Kay.

Sweetie synopsis

Kay (Karen Colston) and Sweetie (Geneviève Lemon) are sisters, although Kay wishes they weren’t. Kay is shy, superstitious and sexually repressed. Sweetie is loud, slovenly and may have mental health issues. Her arrival, with a junkie boyfriend (Michael Lake), disrupts Kay’s attempts to live a normal life with her new boyfriend Louis (Tom Lycos). Things get worse when Kay’s father Gordon (Jon Darling) arrives, after his wife (Dorothy Barry) has left him. The closer they all are to each other, the quicker they start to fall apart.

Sweetie curator's notes

Sweetie was Jane Campion’s first feature film after a series of prestigious shorts and it continued her development of a quirky personal style. It didn’t look like any other Australian films of the late 1980s, and it was more than odd in its concerns. Campion’s later films gave us a series of troubled women whom the rest of the world thought mad (in The Piano and Angel at My Table), but in Sweetie, everyone really is mad, or close to.

The film lays out a continuum of oddness, from the gregarious little boy next door who hurls himself into a tiny rubber pool, to Sweetie’s full-on raving episodes, which may or may not be truly psychotic. Much of the trouble in the family seems to be psychosexual, stemming from the father. There may have been incest, which might explain Sweetie’s hostility towards him, and Kay’s sexual timidity – but Campion never makes it too clear. Ambiguity is her preferred method, and Sweetie works superbly as a destabilised narrative because of it. It’s not just the framing, the odd angles, the wide lenses – it’s the free approach to storytelling, as in the strange and lyrical outback scenes, when Kay, Louis and Gordon take off in the car to get away from Sweetie. On an outback station where Kay’s mother Flo (Dorothy Barry) is a cook, Campion gives us a series of short scenes that suggest a whole different life is possible for these characters – this is a place where people sing and dance, and swim in beautiful rivers. It’s still another weird existence, and it doesn’t suit everyone, but it does suit the women in the story. In Campion’s films, a central question is always about where a woman can finally be happy, and herself.

Notes by Paul Byrnes

Education notes

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.

Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia