5th Avenue Cinema Presents: An Angel at My Table

Dir. Jane Campion (1990); New Zealand, Australia, UK; English; 158 min; DVD

Jane Campion's biographical triptych follows writer Janet Frame through the contours of a life that refused ordinary categories: from an impoverished New Zealand childhood marked by beauty and loss, through years of misdiagnosis and institutionalization, to her emergence as one of her country's most vital literary voices.

Three actors inhabit Frame across the decades, yet the film maintains an uncanny continuity of self, moving elliptically through memory with an intimacy that mirrors the act of reading. Campion keeps her subject centered in nearly every frame, a familiar insistence on Frame's sovereignty over her own story, even when institutions sought to erase it.

What emerges is a candid portrait of someone profoundly out of sync with social codes who discovered that words could be both refuge and triumph. The late beloved Agnès Varda praised the film's intelligence and sensitivity, and Mira Nair has described Campion as "a big sister who opens unexpected doors and gives me courage." That generosity of vision is palpable here. By the film's end, Frame sits alone at her typewriter in a camper near her family's home, and the look on her face suggests someone who has found her place in the world precisely by learning to inhabit her solitude.

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