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| Tookey's Review |
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| Pro Reviews |
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| Mixed Reviews |
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| Anti Reviews |
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| Released: |
1990 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
RITES-OF-PASSAGE
BIOPIC
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| Origin: |
NEW ZEALAND |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
158 |
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A portrait of writer Janet Frame (Kerry Fox), who spent eight years in a mental asylum, wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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This tender, sensitive, realistic film was made as a three-part TV mini-series, and it all too often looks like one: its pace would have been helped by judicious cutting, and the budgetary constraints of TV seem to have inhibited Ms Campion from the imaginative framings which so skilfully reflected the heroine's insanity in her first film, Sweetie. For all that, the film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and is no mean achievement. The childhood scenes have a wonderful freshness of observation; the asylum episode (the second) is harrowing and sad; it's only the third part, with its unconvincing love story, which stretches one's patience, and even here there is much to enjoy in the performance of the leading actress.
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, Karen Fergusson, Alexis Keogh