HEAVENLY CREATURES
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1994 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: New Zealand film director Peter Jackson,
famous for his BAD TASTE, creates a very odd but
fascinating film about the darker side of
imagination. The film tells the true story of two
1950s teenagers who are pulled into a vortex of
creative fantasy and drawn to a bloody and violent
conclusion. This is a surprising and inventive
film that blends fantasy and reality in ways you
haven't seen before. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4)
One of the few remaining "sacred cows" of film is imagination. Nearly all films about imagination profess reverence. Currently we have the remake of MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET telling us how wonderful childhood imagination is and the original film version made the point even more strongly. It is extremely remarkable when we get a film seriously portraying a downside to imagination. Films on this theme include THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE and EQUUS, but not much else that comes to mind. Now an intelligent film has been made on this theme. Even more surprising is the source, director Peter Jackson who previously created BAD TASTE, BRAIN DEAD, and DEAD ALIVE. What is surprising is not just the theme but that the intelligence from one of very few filmmakers who up to this film I would have accused of making films that work only on sheer shock value.
HEAVENLY CREATURES is a dramatization of a famous New Zealand tabloid murder from the 1950s. Life is not easy for Pauline Rieper (played by Melanie Lynsky), an awkward and insecure schoolgirl from a working-class family in Christchurch. She is equally unhappy at home and school and looks for some magical escape route. Enter a transfer student, Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), a bright, artistic, and magnetic English schoolgirl from a cultured academic family. Juliet immediately wins Pauline's admiration for being willing to stand up to the teachers, even correcting the French teacher's grammar. Friendship with Juliet awakens Pauline's imagination and intellect. The two outward opposites become ever-closer friends, dependent on each other and even sexually attracted. Together they concoct an escape fantasy world of imagination--a middle-European realm they call Borovnia, ruled by characters they name Charles, Deborah, and their serial killer son Dielo. Clay figures Juliet creates of these characters come to life in their imagination and in startling special effects scenes.
Jackson's screenplay, which he co-authored with Francis Walsh, captures the rapid shifts from exhilaration to depression and back. The two romantically fixate on Mario Lanza as the great tenor and the king of their fantasy world. One chance comment from one about Orson Welles, and he is the paragon of all the world's evils--the prototype of the mad, knife-wielding Dielo. And with this same melodrama, they react when their alarmed parents attempts to separate the two girls.
The story has much more going on than initially meets the eye. There are subtle signs of class conflict between the two families. There is an intellectual elitism in the two girls, very much like the elitism Maggie Smith's character exploits in THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE. And, of course, there are the homophobic attitudes of the two families anxious to separate the two girls who they see as having been drawn too far into their relationship--with some justification.
This is a film with more visual creativity than many fantasy films. In the imagination of the girls, and on the screen, fields transform into gardens with giant butterflies and unicorns. We travel inside Borovnia--with its golem-like characters based on Juliet's clay figures. Jackson keeps his camera constantly moving as if even the viewer is a hyperkinetic teenager. Peter Jackson has gone from an unpromising beginning of making nearly unwatchable films to in one leap become a talent who deserves watching. I rate this film +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. It would be interesting to get the reactions of the film from the two women who were the subjects. Pauline Rieper (later Parker) still lives in New Zealand. Juliet Hulme is living in Britain and is now a popular novelist under her current name, Anne Perry.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
.
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