Only her second feature film, An Angel at My Table is director Jane Campion’s opus to New Zealand poet and author Janet Frame.
Based on the writer’s own autobiography and structured in three parts like its source, An Angel at My Table draws us, initially, into the chaotic, impoverished childhood home of Frame. A precocious yet popular child with a shock of red hair, it’s only in late teenage years the depression she suffered for most of her life becomes increasingly prevalent. Painfully shy, Frame (Kerry Fox – Bright Star, Top End Wedding) is misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and spent eight years in a mental institution. It’s only at the announcement of winning a major local literary prize in 1951 that saves her from a scheduled lobotomy! Leaving New Zealand for London, Frame eventually finds literary success, spending her time between the UK and Spain before returning years later to the southern hemisphere.
Fox is excellent as the gauche Frame and, whilst guilty of making assumptions on the viewer’s knowledge, the film (originally a three part television miniseries) is bitingly sincere in its unflattering but sensitive telling.
Rating: 71%
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