SOURCE: "Outlaw Princesses," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXVII, No. 15, June 3, 1991, pp. 86-8.

In the following excerpt, Rafferty describes An Angel at My Table as a "perverse exercise in biographical filmmaking," faulting Campion for keeping viewers disoriented and withholding from them a sense of Frame's "inner life."

An Angel at My Table is based on the autobiography of the New Zealand novelist and poet Janet Frame. It covers the first forty years or so of the writer's life—she was born in 1924—and takes close to three hours to tell the story. When it's all over, you feel that you know far too little about Janet Frame and far too much about the film's director, Jane Campion. Frame's life doesn't seem to have been a particularly dramatic one. She grew up shy and literary, in a working-class family that moved around a lot, being shifted from town to...