Piano Lessons

Piano lessons

Jane Campion composes herself

Difficult women come easy for Australian (nйe New Zealand) filmmaker Jane Campion, as can be seen from the retrospective of her films that's about to open at the Harvard Film Archive. From her brilliant first short films (February 3 at 9:15 p.m. and the 7th at 4 p.m.) to her masterpiece The Piano (1993; February 5 at 6:30 p.m., the 6th at 2 p.m., the 7th at 6:30 p.m., and the 8th at 9 p.m.) to her latest feature, the ambitious but disappointing The Portrait of a Lady (1996; February 4 at 6 and 9 p.m. and the 7th at 1 p.m.), Campion explores not only what women want but how they get it.

From the beginning, she herself seems to have known want she wanted as a filmmaker -- and how to get it. Made in 1982, her student short "Peel" establishes in its taut and kinetic nine minutes the style and themes she would develop throughout her career. The color orange and little else unites a father, a mother, and their bratty son on a motor trip: an alarming shade of it glows in the center line of the highway, in the trio's carrot-topped coifs, and in the citrus peels the boy insists on tossing out the window to dad's growing, ineffectual fury. The squabble ends with the two boys locked outside the car, excluded from the fed-up female inside. Related in raw fragments shot from the capricious angles and edited with the elliptical cuts that would become Campion trademarks, the film introduces the male opacity, the female opaqueness, and the genial family chaos that would characterize her best work.

All the woman in "Peel" wants is peace and quiet; the film ends with her infuriating silence. Not so the irrepressible '60s adolescents of "A Girl's Own Story" (1984), a 26-minute black-and-white short investing Campion's whimsy with sinister Buсuelian reverie. Constrained by their Catholic-school uniforms and the weirdness of an inept and vaguely incestuous patriarchy, these girls pursue their yearnings for sex, independence, and the Beatles, finding their voice at last in a dreamy girl-group rendition of a melancholy pop ballad with the recurring lyric "I feel the cold."

These teens return in a contemporary setting and a more calculated format in Campion's studied, rough, but rewarding first feature, 2 Friends (1986; February 13 at 1 p.m.). The film traces the relationship between two teenage girls, beginning with their final break-up and ending with their greatest moment of triumph. Louise (an elfin and prim Emma Coles) is proper, self-controlled, talented; Kelly (a blowzy and endearing Kris Bidenko) is overweight, adventurous, and irresponsible. Both come from fragmented families: Louise's divorced mother, Janet (Kris McQuade), is more a sister than a parent; Kelly's mother, Chris (Debra May), has remarried an unsympathetic blowhard named Malcolm (Peter Hehir) who chummily tyrannizes the family.

Although she didn't write the script, Campion's personal touch can be seen in the film's offbeat narrative structure -- it's a series of episodes going back in time -- and its themes of social repression, conformity, rebellion, and the limits of communication and reconciliation. She would give similar material a more personal and inspired spin in her next feature, the bizarre and bravura Sweetie (1989; February 5 at 9 p.m. and the 7th at 9 p.m.), which would bring her international attention.

Once again, Campion subverts the good-girl/bad-girl stereotypes, not to mention filmmaking conventions. The first half of the movie relates with deadpan whimsy the drab absurdities beleaguering mousy Kay (Karen Colston), whose relationship with her blandly well-intended boyfriend begins to go wrong when she uproots the tiny tree he plants in their asphalted yard to commemorate their love. Kay's fear of the destructive power of roots and family trees becomes understandable when her overweight and overwrought sister, Sweetie (Genevieve Lemon), drops in to stay.

A difficult woman and then some, Sweetie is infantile id at its most demanding, a mess of insatiable appetites and deluded ambitions of show-biz success. Her increasingly psychotic tantrums are given counterpoint by Campion's oddball but unobtrusive editing, compositions, and camera angles (shot from under beds or the upper corners of rooms, the film seems observed from the point of view of a naughty child or a flighty imp). The inescapable center of attention of her bedraggled family, she brings chaos and clarity, disruption and reconciliation, and, in the end, when the tree's threat is fulfilled, a sardonic redemption.

The travails of the troubled woman prove grimmer and more hopeful in An Angel at My Table (1990; February 20 at 2 p.m. and the