Kritiken

At times, the film is like reading a diary, full of tiny (and mundane, sometimes to the point of boredom) details, but they collectively add up to give dimension to a heroine who seems so private she resists becoming full-bodied on the screen.

I feel that when I watch this movie I am participating in storytelling, in the building of the film. It emanates this feeling of somebody being there and just saying, “I want to tell you a story,” and the way you’re guided through draws you in—through the colors, the actors—in a way that is so enjoyable it’s almost as if you’re in water and just let yourself be carried by the flow.

A heartbreaking, honest, while also at times bleakly comical, depiction of one of New Zealand’s most celebrated artists... An Angel at My Table is remarkable for its attention to detail, for its pure, striking and resonant images, and for its appreciation of human idiosyncrasies.

Campion reveals Frame's prose as much through the film's cinematography as she does by allowing Frame's words to be narrated. When observing these girls on the stairs, it transcends ethnography or scorn, it achieves adoration and pathos. Janet, excluded from their grouping, finds incredible poetry in her role as the outsider. Neither rage nor regret overtakes her, and she sees the world fresh and beautiful.

This is not only a great film by a great director – of course, there could never be any doubt about that – but for the first time I felt here was a film that could only have been made by a woman, this woman. And not only as a filmmaker but woman as a whole, brave, brave as a human can be. This is not a film about a brave woman's tormented heroic destiny... No, it has something deeper, more urgent to declare about films and women. This film changed my life as a woman, not simply as a filmmaker.

It's no doubt a heartfelt tribute to a soft-spoken, melancholic writer from a director who claims to cherish her work as being very important in her own development. And though it's shackled to that unyielding, difficult narrative structure of most biopics, this quality also works to the film's benefit as Frame's life is unspooled with the same sort of scenes-as-brushstrokes impressionism of Im Kwon-taek's Chihwaseon.

By keeping Janet in the center of almost every shot, Campion suggests that, despite the difficulties her heroine experiences in her social relationships and her sense of not fitting any of the institutional roles prescribed for her, she has a remarkably strong sense of self, which will eventually become manifest in her writing... The modesty of Frame's style demanded an act of self-effacement on the part of the filmmaker, who brilliantly channeled her onto the screen.

Campion's grasp of her material is intellectually and emotionally assured, while Fox's extraordinary performance demonstrates an honesty, courage and power that's rarely attempted, let alone achieved.

Jane Campion's stirring follow-up to Sweetie adapts the autobiographical trilogy of New Zealand writer Janet Frame into a 163-minute feature, originally made for New Zealand TV--clearly a labor of love by a masterful talent responding to a soulmate. The poetic empathy, the beautiful, offbeat framing and unexpected transitions, and the magnificent handling of actors are all pure Campion.

Jane Campion's "An Angel at My Table" tells her story in a way that I found strangely engrossing from beginning to end. This is not a hyped-up biopic or a soap opera, but simply the record of a life as lived... It is visually beautiful, and, yes, it is well-acted, but it doesn't call attention to its qualities.

"An Angel at My Table" is a big, sprawling, unshapely thing, insufferably verbose and, at the same time, touched with magnificence... Even if it fails to solve the riddle of its subject, the movie, in its own opaque, subterranean way, cuts into us. Though its final chord is celebratory, there's so much gut-wrenching suffering in this tale that our hearts feel anchored in sadness.

The narrator's insights coincide with her character's. An interesting strategy except that the memoir gains immeasurably once Frame the subject becomes Frame the writer. The last volume, finally, is packed with perception. Conversely, the movie is best in the opening, childhood section.