DVD Review: Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table on the Criterion Collection

Jane Campion initially conceived of her adaptation of author Janet Frame’s series of three autobiographies, To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City, as a TV miniseries. Only into production did the New Zealand Film Commission suggest a theatrical release, apparently because the biopic is the singular genre that looks, feels, and acts like episodic television and still plays nominally well in movie theaters. The film, named after the volume of Frame’s memoirs that recounts her elongated residence in a psychiatric ward, is no doubt a heartfelt tribute to a soft-spoken, melancholic writer from a director who claims to cherish her work as being very important in her own development. And though An Angel at My Table is shackled to that unyielding, difficult narrative structure of most biopics, this quality also works to the film’s benefit, as Frame’s life is unspooled with the same sort of scenes-as-brushstrokes impressionism of Im Kwon-taek’s Chihwaseon.

Still, whereas Im’s film becomes increasingly restless and elliptical as it goes on, culminating in one of the most poetic representations of an artist stepping into legend (via a kiln), An Angel at My Table begins at the pinnacle of Campion’s whimsicality before settling into a mundane processional march. Janet, first seen as a baby covering her face trying to deflect her approaching mother’s bosom, followed by a panorama of her as a knobby-kneed pre-teen against the rolling New Zealand landscape, goes through her early childhood as an outcast at school. She’s from a poor family, has poor hygiene (later in her teens, she let her teeth rot brown), and when she offers her entire class chewing gum bought with money she stole from her father’s woolen pocket, her teacher reveals her thievery to the class, who then sneers.

Which is to say nothing of the untamable patch of ginger cotton growing from Frame’s scalp, which remains a constant in her life as she moves from the university to the asylum to a successful writing career complete with grants to travel to Paris and Spain. An Angel at My Table traces Frame’s life across more than 30 years, and she’s portrayed by three different actresses (in order of age: Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, and Kerry Fox) whose remarkable resemblance to each other extends beyond their appearance and mannerisms. They seamlessly pass the psychological baton and collectively sculpt a convincing portrait of growth.

Campion’s knack for intimate yet paradoxically epic artistry nibbles off Laura Jones’s bite-sized scene-sketches of loneliness and makes entire meals of them, swallowing cast and location up alike in an effort to centralize the three actresses playing Frame, and to the point that even the most major supporting characters (her older sister, an American lover in Ibiza) are delegated to the sidelines. Given the manner in which Frame’s wild crown of fuzz takes up the upper part of the frame across the film’s many close-ups, she comes to resemble a kind of hourglass, suggesting (however inadvertently) the time that she struggles to remember and catalog in writing her own memoirs, as well as the time she lost in a mental institution, where she endured no less than 200-odd electroshock treatments. Campion’s film comes up short, however, in never satisfactorily illustrating the importance or character of Frame’s writing, which, while lauded for its selflessness, can’t survive the filmmaker’s tightly honed individualist scrutiny without occasionally lapsing into solipsism.

Image/Sound

An Angel at My Table was originally shot in 16mm and then blown up to 35mm for the theatrical release. In any case, this is probably the most astonishing-looking digital transfer of a 16mm source I’ve seen since Criterion’s Brakhage set. The only major defect I could detect was some pixellization on some of the darker blues and blacks. Otherwise it’s sharp without being an eyesore, with a surprisingly vibrant variety of hues. Even if the film acts like a miniseries, it doesn’t necessarily look like one. Even better is the 5.1 surround mix, with lots of live effects with plenty of space around them. The dialogue sounds a little low, and the digitization of the music score sometimes gives it a glassy harshness, but that could just be because the presentation is so acutely clear.

Extras

Just as the film is split into three sections, with three actresses sharing its lead role, so is Criterion’s commentary track split into a triptych between director Campion, the director of photography Stuart Dryburgh, and actress Kerry Fox. They were recorded separately, so all the observations come in start-and-stop hiccups, but I suppose that it would be a bit much to expect each one to handle the entire 158-minute duration by themselves, though I’d lay money on Campion being the most likely of the three. Their comments fall on the film-school side of the stuffy-gossipy continuum, usually talking about the logistics and economics of shooting a film commissioned by the government (admittedly a pretty foreign concept to most people in DVD Region 1), but all three are intelligent and well-spoken. Even more intelligent and well-spoken is Janet Frame herself, presented in a nearly half-hour long radio chat from the early 1980s. She sounds nowhere near as painfully shy as she’s portrayed in the film. There’s a short, fluffy “making of” featurette, a still gallery, and a theatrical trailer on the disc. And the insert booklet comes with a critical essay by Amy Taubin (who reads strangely dispassionate) and three excerpts from Frame’s autobiographies.

Overall

Undoubtedly careful, tasteful filmmaking. But, then again, Janet Frame’s writing could also be described as careful and tasteful.