A halo of wild red curls is the most prominent feature in the three episodes of Jane Campion’s 1990 miniseries made for New Zealand television, An Angel at My Table, based on three autobiographies by Campion’s compatriot and fellow eccentric artist, Janet Frame. These signature locks, atop the heads of three different actresses, unmistakably identify our heroine from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood but are, in fact, merely a frizzy red frivolity, since every pained and awkward movement also corresponds from actress to actress. Karen Fergusson, Alexia Keogh, and Kerry Fox hand off Frame’s story, relay-style, over the course of 30-odd years, from the Thirties through the Sixties. From the young Fergusson holding everyday objects too large for her pudgy little hands, to the trembling Keogh slipping a hand under her bottom to see if she has bled on the seat at school, to the haunted Kerry Fox, now a teacher, hiding behind placards and freezing up during lectures, Angel is a biopic handcrafted with love and respect by a woman very obviously inspired by, and artistically related to, her subject. However, rather than coming off as a white wine-drinking Women’s Studies major’s obligatory masters thesis about “the one woman in all of history I would have slept with,” (see Frida), An Angel at My Tableis a frighteningly wrought, personal work that remains simultaneously faithful to Frame’s writing style and life stories (Criterion thoughtfully provides excerpts from the three Frame autobiographies in question) and to Campion’s particular interest in the fragile and complex female psyche.

The first in the triptych, “To the Is-land,” is a meandering portrait of Frame’s gaggle of sisters, rife with Sapphic overtones typical to Campion’s penchant for romanticizing girlish whimsy. The film’s younger actresses were found in New Zealand public schools, apparently chosen for their inherently maladroit airs. A certain tension is immediately established between the natural, frank approach of these actors and the purposeful camera-stylo of Stuart Dryburgh, whose hyper-real New Zealand landscapes may have inspired the new line of previously unimagined colors from Crayola in the early Nineties. This tension works well for the film as we move into the unstable world of the adult Janet Frame in episodes two and three, “An Angel at My Table” and “The Envoy from Mirror City.” The movie’s skewed dynamic, which continually suspends us between fantasy and reality, is reflective of the protagonist’s outlook as she seems locked constantly between her own autistic world and that of the outside. The most disturbing element of the story surfaces in episode two, when childish imagination morphs into what is perceived as unhealthy behavior. The adult Janet begins exhibiting somewhat anxious conduct and is immediately thrown into the deep, inescapable pit that is the mental health system, even worse in the Fifties than it is today.

If Janet Frame were just starting out in therapy now, she would be assigned a seat on the Paxil train like the rest of us. But at her college in New Zealand in the Fifties, the writing of a personal essay, wherein she alludes to a suicide attempt, catches the attention of a much-fetishized professor and subsequently gets her slapped with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and sentenced to eight years of heavy shock treatment. In one of the most harrowing portrayals I have yet seen of life in a mental institution, a close, intimate camera tracks the length of Frame’s body as she receives her first electric correction. The image of her pasty calves spasming in a sickish blue light becomes all the more disturbing when juxtaposed with the placid smile on her face two scenes later as she is approached by two unidentified people to sign copies of the book she didn’t know had been published. It’s both painful and strangely inspiring to see this character, so soft and serene, undergo a continual barrage of harsh blows both in and out of the hospital, and remain, as ever, staunch, sharp, and determined to pursue her calling. Even from inside her own personal Bell Jar, Frame remains aimed unflinchingly at the goal of earning a living and a name for herself as a writer.

After years in and out of mental institutions and a near-miss with a lobotomy (she was spared only because her book won a national prize), Frame’s stigma is lifted when a doctor tells her she was never schizophrenic, just artsy and grossly misdiagnosed. The unexpected effect of this reversal is Frame’s feeling of loss, or, as she writes in The Envoy from Mirror City, being “stripped of a garment I had worn for 12 or 13 years — my schizophrenia.” She is terrified and asks, “How could I ask for help directly when there was ‘nothing wrong with me’?” The trauma of dealing with the sudden disappearance of the security blanket of mental illness proves another obstacle in episode three, which details her life as a newly liberated young woman traveling abroad. Throughout her travails, which include a dingy London flat with a satyr of a roommate and seduction by a corny, self-important American poet in Spain, Frame remains concentrated on writing, and it is this passion that is the one drive that sticks with her throughout the course of the film, and so, throughout the course of her life.

Extras abound on this release, among them an exceptionally insightful audio commentary by Campion, Stuart Dryburgh, and Kerry Fox. Also included is a verbose 23-minute audio interview with Janet Frame herself, wherein one statement stands out: “I think a writer needs to lead a solitary life.” Accordingly, Campion conceived of this film as a television miniseries, which she considered would be a more lonely experience than that of the communal movie theater. But regardless of their need to be alone, both Campion and Frame search for connection to others in their work, as Campion, herself, states in the making-of documentary: “I try to understand the world each time I make a movie...to really understand…what it means to be a human being in this world and I think that’s basically the nature of living.”
—SARAH SILVER