SOURCE: A review of Sweetie, in New Republic, Vol. 202, No. 3919, February 26, 1990, pp. 26-7.

Kauffmann is an American playwright, actor, director, and critic. In the following excerpt, he contends that Campion is more interested in her film's visual impact than its narrative.

Jane Campion is a newcomer, a New Zealander who works in Australia and is now loudly hailed in America. Sweetie is her first feature. She wrote it with Gerard Lee; but after the first five or six minutes, it's clear that her heart is not in the screenplay, it's in the pictures that she makes with her cinematographer Sally Bongers.

Still, there is a screenplay—about a young Australian factory worker named Kay, who believes in omens and hauntings. Tea leaves, for instance. A medium tells her that a question mark will figure in her life. She then meets Lou, a young man whose hair curls in...