"nor was there any escape from the horror of my decayed teeth."

what a line! really, if you didn't know that jane campion's 1989 film "an angel at my table" was based on autobiographies before you'd seen it, you'd have a hard time believing it.

new zealand author janet frame lived a life out of a tragic novel. the first part of this three part film is frame growing up in poverty with a mass of siblings, unpopular, desperately unattractive, a fat, rather filthy little girl with an amazing cloud of red hair. very quickly she latches onto poetry and fiction as refuges from the world, both reading and writing them. even though friends are scarce, she's not unhappy in her jolly, if weird, family. the tragedy begins when her older sister drowns, and builds in the film's second part as frame heads off to university. social graces are not her strong suit, and feeling cornered as she heads into a teaching career, a professor is alarmed at a short story she writes detailing how she got out of a sticky situation by making herself sick. very quickly she is cajoled into a psych ward, and then taken to a mental hospital that doesn't joke around, doing electroshock therapy in the open ward. she's slapped with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and it's around this time that another sister drowns. the next eight years and 200 electroshock treatments were enough to make her crazy if she wasn't before. the film's a bit hazy on the details of how her short stories are published and win a literary prize, but they're enough to save her from invasive surgery, and she's soon sprung from the hospital.

somehow, the third part seemed to me the saddest, although it's when she travels to europe and begins to receive some real notoriety as an author. but it's only too evident how much was taken away from her, she cries at the slightest provocation, and you want to look away every time she faces a new social situation, because you know it's going to be cringe-inducing. somewhere in all of that it's decided that she was never schizophrenic to begin with. the movie ends with janet living in a tiny caravan out the back of her sister's house. it doesn't seem enough. but i suppose some lives are like that.

the film is visually sumptuous -- it's a shame new zealand is so far away, it's awful pretty. the trio of actresses playing janet are spot-on and there are seamless transitions from one to another, although the youngest janet you want to hug, and the oldest janet (kerry fox), well, you want to hug her too, but you'd also just like to cross the street.

ultimately, it's a fascinating story, and that's what makes the film.