#SWEETIE MOVIE CRACKED#

In fact, Kay’s greatest anger towards Sweetie stems from her jealousy that she’ll never be granted the sense of freedom she imagines her sister has because of the unconditional parental love Sweetie received (in irresponsible spades)… and she feels she never did.Įven within the raw pain, Campion never strays far from amusement.

#SWEETIE MOVIE CRACKED#

Kay (Karen Colston), an eccentric (to say the least) loner, shamelessly steals the just engaged Louis (Tom Lycos) away from his new fiancée (a fellow office co-worker of both), not because she has any genuine affinity for the poor shlep, but because a curl of his hair resembles a question mark, which matches up with a psychic ‘tea leaf’ reading she had earlier… then grows just as suddenly put-off with anxiety after the naïve, good natured Louis (now her husband) decides to plant a single small tree in the middle of the cracked concrete front yard of their new home, which portends of grave things for the superstitious Kay, who eventually feels she has no choice but to get rid of it.Īnd all this happens before the arrival of the titular character at about the halfway point – that being Kay’s plump, heavily-mascara-eyed and egregiously childish sister Dawn, aka Sweetie, (described as a ‘dark force’ by Kay), played by Genevieve Lemon, in a startling performance, with her drugged-out ‘manager’/boyfriend Bob (Michael Lake) in tow, to wreak havoc in their – well – already fairly unhappy home… followed soon after by the combative sister’s parents, who have their own train wreck of a relationship going on – with mamma Mrs Schneller (Jean Hadgraft) having just left daddy Teddy (Paul Livingston), mostly over his continued coddling and protection of the increasingly unmanageable and destructive Sweetie.Ĭampion presents a bizarre and irreverent look at mental illness and burrowing, deeply see-sawing behaviour within a family, constantly swaying between enabling and rejecting (often doing both at the same time) in a desperate bid to attain some stability in their own lives (which are already filled with dysfunction – Sweetie may be an exaggerated, grotesque-sized example from the group, but she is by no means alone in being out-to-lunch in this family, speaking to that chicken-or-egg thing). Cinéma Moderne, part of the monthly CELLEuloid program

Sweetie movie