Rating: 5/5
Criterion Challenge 2022 | 49/52 | Agnes Varda’s Closet Picks
An Angel at My Table is a three-part film based on Janet Frame’s three autobiographies. Each actress portrays Janet Frame at a different point in her life: childhood, teenage years, and adulthood, the latter making up the second and much of the third sections. The film takes its name from the second of Frame’s autobiographies, which makes up the middle portion of this film.
Born in August 1924 on the predominantly rural South Island of New Zealand, Janet Paterson Frame, nicknamed Jean, was born a twin, the other dying two weeks after childbirth. Her brother, George, suffers epileptic seizures, which leads to bullying at school. Janet takes to poetry in school, so her father gets her a notebook to write more. Her friend Poppy gives her a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which opens the door to her love of literature and poetry. But when Poppy teaches Janet the word “fuck,” her father beats her and forbids them from seeing Poppy again. When Janet graduates primary school, she is allowed free access to the Athenaeum, where she checks out all sorts of books.
The film follows Janet’s sad and traumatic life as she uses writing to make sense of it and find a way to live it on her own terms.
Jane Campion read Frame’s novels at thirteen. While in film school, she read An Angel at My Table and knew she wanted to make something based on the autobiography. Though initially designed as a TV miniseries, the project became a film. As a result, the visual language, while beautiful, is more sparse, living in the medium and close-up shots ideal for television.
The film feels like a series of vignettes, the way memory lives in slices of moments, starting and ending before we can make total sense of what we see—not in an experimental way, but simply abrupt and unadorned. The film uses sparse narration, giving us only what the film does not have the space to convey, most often lines of poetry. Otherwise, the camera is a careful and discerning observer, intensely focusing on Frame’s pained silence and the depths of emotion that cannot help but come to the surface.
The film also uses moments of symbolic foreshadowing: passing the Seacliff train station, Myrtle faded in a family photograph — symbols, no doubt, from the autobiography but translated seamlessly into visual language.
Each of the three actors who portray Janet gives phenomenal performances, bringing out certain aspects the others might not, but always feel like one person. When the movie transitions to Janet as a teenager, it took me a minute to realize that a different actor was on screen.
If this movie sounds grim, you’re not wrong. However, the filmmaking has such warmth and lack of self-effacement that it would punish the experience. If you’ve seen other Campion films, you may have a sense of darkness in mind. Campion’s films have a remarkable ability to explore darkness and trauma, excavating the interiority of women—the relationships they build or, more often, endure. The movie, however, is hopeful in Frame’s undying resilience.
Kerry Fox does unbelievable work. The film owes much of its power to her empathetic performance as such a singular person as Frame. Her pains became mine, and her victories, too. I don’t think I’ve ever cheered so much when someone got laid in a movie.
An Angel at My Table was Campion’s breakthrough, earning her the esteem of being the first New Zealand film to be screened at the Venice Film Festival. New Zealand’s most brilliant filmmaker brings the story of its most distinguished authors to life in such a moving and engrossing portrait.