2023 Tarkovsky Prize Honorable Mention: Marshall Muscat
AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE
by Marshall Muscat
Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table (1990) follows the life of Janet Frame, a real-life poet and author. It covers her journey from a child to adulthood. We get a vulnerable experience of someone's life through a film that feels like a turbulent sea, full of devastating low points.
Opening on the green farmlands of New Zealand, we meet the Frames, a working-class family with heads full of curly, red hair.
It's an idyllic landscape, but the tone of the films quickly becomes more serious as one of the first scenes of Janet in an elementary school where she is caught sharing chewing gum by the teacher and lied when questioned, resulting in her getting sent to stand against the blackboard until she tells the truth. She is singled out in front of the class, creating a divide between her and her peers.
As the film continues, the tone darkens more as her brother struggles with epilepsy, causing fear to spread throughout the house and making a financially unstable household even more uneasy. Tragedy continues as one of her older sisters drowns, driving Janet into a depression.
Later when she's in college, she abandons her studies to realize her dream of becoming a poet, and sets off to start a writing career where she moves around Europe creating poems.
However, she experiences more tragedy as her issues with depression get misdiagnosed as schizophrenia and she is sent to a mental asylum where she is subjected to over 200 sessions of shock therapy.
She is only freed when her work is published and becomes popular. With her newfound freedom she moves to Italy meeting a new cast of characters, including a love interest who eventually leaves her, but she moves on and moves back to New Zealand.
The film has frequent time skips such as jumping from Janet's life in high school to seeing her as a fully adjusted college student in the next shot, but the shift in time always feels so seamless and I was easily able to understand what was happening right away without it feeling like the director is obnoxiously announcing what stage of life Janet is in.
Even with the dark tone of the film, it never feels unrealistic and the characters feel very relatable. All of this personality and human empathy is pushed into the audience by the camerawork. The movie is filled with shots of faces shot on a handheld camera,
making the viewers gain a better understanding of the characters' emotions and even draw them into the world as if they were a part of the story as well.
The ending of the movie left me extremely satisfied. The final shots of the reporters struggling to climb the green New Zealand hills that Janet comfortably sat upon tied the story together expertly and made it feel like a full story. We are returning to the place where the film started, but with Janet as a changed and complete person.
An Angel at my Table was a story that made me think about helplessness and start to understand what it means to be a woman. Throughout the film, her feelings are discarded, she isn't taken seriously, and she's seen as an object by those around her.
From the elementary school classroom, the treatment of Janet by her teacher makes her feel ostracized in her community from the very beginning.
At home, she's never put first because of issues with money and her brother's condition. This has a severe impact on her mental health and shows how the situation that she grew up in put her at a disadvantage from the start, which serves as a parallel to the situation many women find themselves in, even in today's society.
Her sister's death scarred her, but nobody was able to take her feelings seriously, leaving her to feel hopeless and lost.
Her roommate that she was forced to stay with in London put on a front of "looking out for her, but there was always an uncomfortable implication that treated her like that because of her gender, and because he wanted to keep control over her as a woman.
The electroshock therapy was probably the most difficult part of the film, where countless women during the time were dismissed and the only solution provided was to essentially cause brain damage to them. She is only released from the facility and given basic human treatment after gaining a reputation and following from her poetry work that almost none amount to, further emphasizing the lack of credibility that society gives women.
In Italy, she is cast aside by a man she thought she could trust because he doesn't see her as anything more than a naive woman.
Even the man that Janet finds romance with struck me as weirdly pushy and it felt like he was pressuring her into the sex that they had at the start of their relationship. It felt like he didn't entirely value Janet's feelings, even if he did "love" her.
I went to see An Angel at my Table on a whim, but I ended up thoroughly enjoying the film and it felt like something that contributed to my understanding of the world. In an age where movie productions capitalize on showing off women's bodies, this film offers a contrasting look on real struggles that people can relate to, and even makes the sec scenes. not feel sexualized. Campion doesn't offer something empowering, but used this film to recognize those struggling like Janet and I believe that it could help them feel less alone in their lives.