Janet Frame has called Jane Campion's three-part television adaptation
of her autobiographies "delightful" and it's not difficult to imagine her
enjoyment of this telling of her story. Angel at My Table is a much more
conventional work than either Sweetie or the books on which it is based. For a
start, it has a heroine. The portrait of a sweet-natured, imaginative, painfully
embarassed girl and young woman who became a great writer is a sympathetic and
admiring one. There are passages of fierce identification with Frame's pain -
her last sight of her sister Myrtle, her subjection to shock treatment, for
example - that have a simpler, more direct emotional impact than anything
Campion has done before.
Like all of her work and much of Frame's, Angel is
characterised by arresting perceptions of the absurd and the beautiful in the
ordinary. Beautifully shot, it also displays a keen, often eerily accurate eye
for the New Zealand past. Laura Jones' adaptation has the modesty and good sense
not to delve into the meanings behind those intriguing titles: To the Is-Land,
Angel at My Table and Envoy from Mirror City. The dramatic focus is on Frame's
life, her family and her relationship to a society that long deemed her crazy
and locked her away for eight years. We're left in no doubt that writing saved
Janet Frame's life, but for her remarkable perceptions about tuming life into
writing, it's necessary to retum to the books. In doing so, it will be
impossible to put aside the pictures conjured up in Jane Campion's lovely
homage.
-Bill Gosden, Wellington Film Festival, 1990.
~~Special Jury Prize at Venice Film Festival