Avis des critiques

It might not be Campion's best film, or even her most experimental (IN THE CUT is the frontrunner for that distinction), but it could be her most mysterious in execution as well as intent.

Campion lends a tremendous amount of empathy to both Sweetie and Kay. Sweetie's presence has a domineering presence on the action and direction of the film, but Campion's aesthetic holds true to Kay's point of view... Through Kay's eyes, Sweetie takes on a monstrous quality, but she's always injected with a sense of wonderment.

Campion’s mysterious visual style, which exists in a sort of waking life: capturing things that are real but don’t quite seem there, or things that are there but don’t quite seem real... Sweetie [is] a beautifully strange and compelling film debut.

Amazingly, as [the director] veers without warning from black comedy to bleak melodrama and back again, she manages to make us laugh at and like her confused, barely articulate characters, so that her dénouement is simultaneously ludicrous and deeply affecting. Sweetie confirms Campion as a highly original movie talent.

More than two decades since its Cannes premiere launched the New Zealand-born, Australian-based Campion onto the world stage, "Sweetie" has lost little of its mysterious charm and transgressive power. A family portrait that keeps shifting its center of gravity, a tragicomedy that doesn't settle for easy laughter or tears, it can be a hard film to get a fix on — a testament to how skillfully Campion thwarts viewer expectations.

Sweetie’s brilliance stems from how Campion inventively explores the relationship between inanimate objects and personal memory, Sally Bongers’s static camera lingering on the precipice of a family unit brimming with secrets and lies.

Sweetie moves from the realm of psychological depth to that of a flamboyant surface style to be appreciated in its own right: its insistent weirdness of tone, plot, and technique takes the tale that it seemed to be recounting and makes it the stage on which a bold experimentation is performed. It is as if the deconstructive qualities of the short films persisted and contagiously took over Sweetie's narrative universe, making this full-length film an avant-garde work too.

There are many possible ways of approaching Sweetie — through its subject, its style, its performances, and its overall transgressiveness, to name the most important — but none of them seems entirely adequate, particularly in relation to all the others. The film's impact is relatively seamless, and to break it up into separate aspects is to ignore the way they consistently work together.

[Sweetie] is real, it's the genuine article, and it's there on the screen in all of its defiant strangeness. Most movies slide right through our minds without hitting anything. This one screams and shouts every step of the way.

''Sweetie'' looks like a small movie, and in every measurable way it is, but it possesses remarkable strength and tenacity. It is funny, though one doesn't often laugh at it, and sad, without ever asking for tears. Instead, it demands that it be taken on its own spare terms without regard to the sentimental conventions of other movies. At its best, it is audaciously unreasonable.

Sweetie is an original, audacious tragicomedy... Genevieve Lemon is so good... that her part seems too small. Karen Colston is fine as the sensitive, constantly nervous Kay. As Sweetie’s tacky, somnolent boyfriend, Michael Lake steals his scenes.