![]() When we are first introduced to Sweetie when she breaks into Kay and Louis’ house, Kay cannot even tell Louis that Sweetie is her sister. Kay carries around the scars of her family from the very beginning of the film. This relates right to the previous scenes with the fortune teller who tells Kay that she sees an important man in her future that is offering a deep love and has a “question mark on his face.” When Kay notices Louis’ hair, they end up in the parking lot kissing and this sets the rest of the narrative in motion. A subsequent scene where we clearly see Kay’s subjectivity is when she sees Louis’ hair and birthmark forming a “question mark” on his forehead. It shows Kay’s feelings of isolation from those around her. This is an effective shot used by Campion in her other films like the short A Girl’s Own Story. As the girl’s look at the diamond ring, one looks toward the camera and asks Kay, “Have you seen Cheryl’s diamond?” We then cut to a shot of Kay sitting on the other side of the room by herself. In the cafeteria, Kay’s coworkers gather around to celebrate Lou and Cheryl’s engagement. We can see Kay’s feet deliberately stepping around the cracks in the pavement, reinforcing what we just heard her saying about her fear of trees and their branches. After a beautiful tracking shot of Kay walking down the street, Campion cuts to a close up of Kay’s footsteps on the sidewalk. She mentions how the roots of the tree in her backyard would burst through the ground leaving cracks in the pavement. In the opening scene, we see and hear Kay having a therapy session where she explains her phobia of trees. Campion does an excellent job of showing the strain this puts on those around Sweetie, Kay in particular. Kay, Sweetie’s sister, spends the first half of the film living with the emotional scars of her sister’s mental illness and the second half literally living with her sister Dawn and having her life turned upside down in the process. Jane Campion’s Sweetie is named after the mentally ill character of Dawn but the story is almost entirely told through the eyes of the main character, Kay. ![]()
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