Heavenly Creatures

WingNut Films co-produced with Fontana Film Productions GmbH in association with the New Zealand Film Commission, ий 1994. Location: Christchurch. Distributor: Roadshow/Miramax/Buena Vista. Rating: GA, May 1994. 35m. Dolby Stereo. Colour. Panavision.108 mins.

Director: Peter Jackson. Producer: Jim Booth. Co-producer: Peter Jackson. Executive Producer: Hanno Huth. Screenplay: Frances Walsh, Peter Jackson. Director of photography: Alun Bollinger. Editor: Jamie Selkirk. Production designer: Grant Major. Costume designer: Nglia Dickson. Prosthetic effects designer: Richard Taylor. Digital effects operator: George Port. Visual effects: W.E.T.A. Ltd. Scenic artist: Ian McDonald. Sculptors: Maurice Quin, James Johnston, Rob Gordon, Bodhi Vincent. Composer: Peter Dasent. Orchestration: Bob Young. Players: Auckland Philarmonia Orchestra. Conductor: Peter Scholes. Sound: Hammond Peek, Michael Hopkins, Greg Bell, Michael Hedges, Michael Jones.

Cast

Melanie Lynsky (Pauline), Kate Winslet (Juliet), Diana Kent (Hilda), Sarah Peirse (Honora), Clive Merrison (Henry), Jed Brophy (John/Nicholas), Kirsti Ferry (Wendy), Peter Elliott (Bill Perry), Jean Guerin (Orson Welles), Geoffrey Heath (Reverend Norris), Ben Fransham (Charles), Simon O'Connorr (Herbert), with Andrew Sanders, Ben Skjellerup, Jesse Griffin, Glen Drake, Chris Clarkson, Gilbert Goldie, Elizabeth Moody, Liz Mullane, Moreen Eason, Pearl Carpenter, Toni Jones, Nick Farra, Ray Henwood, John Nicoll, Darien Takle, Mike Maxwell, Raewyn Pelham, Glenys Lloyd-Smith, Lou Dobson, Wendy Watson, Jessica Bradley, Gina Parker, Stephen Reilly, Andrea Sanders, Alex Shirtcliffe-Scott, Barry Thomson, Michael Wilson, Nicky McCarthy, Peter Jackson.

1953. At Christchurch Girls' High School Pauline Rieper, a naive and moody loner, is enchanted by new girl Juiet Hulme's glamorous sophistication, extraordinary confidence and wild imagination. Their friendship flourishes with their common love of fantasy and ritual. They invent a non-Christian "fourth world" of 'music, art, and pure enjoyment', medieval Borovnia, and people it with plasticine characters. Mario Lanza is their idol and Orson Welles their bete noir. Pauline records their stories and plans in her diary. When Juliet is hospitalized with tuberculosis they write to each other as their fantasy characters, Charles (Pauline) and Deborah (Juliet). Pauline has sex with a boarder, but her heart is with Juliet. With her parents opposing the

friendship Pauline becomes increasingly depressed and refuses to eat. Her antagonism towards her mother, Honora, is exacerbated by a doctor's conclusion the girl is homosexual. When Juliet's parents decide to separate, the girls are hysterical to learn that Juliet is to be sent to South Africa. Allowed to spend a final three weeks together, intimations are that their relationship becomes sexual. Deserate that they stay together, Juliet falls in with Pauline's idea to "moider Mother". On 11 June 1954, they kill Honora in Victoria Park by bashing her repeatedly on the head with a brick. Onscreen information explains that police used Pauline's diaries as evidence and that the girls served time in separate prisons before being released on the condition that they never meet again.

A psychological study of obsessional friendship, Heavenly Creatures is an original, unsettling and chilling depiction of the infamous Parker-Hulme story (Pauline was charged under her mother's maiden name when it was discovered that her parents had never married). The film opens with a 1950's Pictorial Parade, showing the city off as a genteel and orderly outpost of the British Empire that is abruptly interrupted by footage of two screaming, blood-covered teenage girls. Thus the first two sequences eloquently frame the central questions: by what path did the two teenage girls at this point in New Zealand's history arrive at the ghastly act of mother murder? And how could this society's image of itself be so awry?

The film's triumph is that, using Pauline's own words from her diaries and an extra-ordinary collaborate film-making imagination, it provides credible insights without patronising the viewer with answers impossible to give. Both girls are outsiders and intensely passionate. Isolated through illness as children, they lack interest in their peers and are contemptuous of authority. Juliet, shaped by a British upbringing, the priviledges of money and class and parental neglect, fascinates the other, more 'ordinary' girl. Oblivious to Pauline's social and financial inferiority, Juliet is delighted to find a friend willing to be caught up in the exhilaration of her wild ideas. It is the dissolution of the boundary between fantasy and reality, and in the terrible fear of separation, that the seed of matricide is sewn.

Meticulous attention is paid to historical detail, one example being that the Hulme's actual house was used, enhanced by a computer-generated balcony added to it to show it as it was in the 1950's. Basing the script partly on interviews with people who knew the girls, the story is told with superb creative verve. Brilliant computer-generated visuals, the first to be used in a New Zealand feature

film, take the viewer into the girl's fervid minds in startling and witty images, from unicorns and giant butterflies in a gorgeous manor garden to castle people with life-sized 'plasticine' characters. 1950's Christchurch is in part evoked using the same technology and in the most startling scenes, the 'real' and 'fantasy' worlds collide. The cinematic wizardry, which includes excellent widescreen cinematography, production design, editing and musical score, is matched by a well-structured script full of wit and sympathy. Consummate performances are given by all the actors (casting was in England and New Zealand), but particularily by Sarah Peirse as the careworn, likeable moider victim and by the two young women, Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey, charged with bringing the passions and torment of Juliet and Pauline to life.

On the film's release the ethics of dramatising blighted lives were discussed as renewed interest in the case led to thee whereabouts of both women being revealed. In a bizarre sequel, now the Scotland-based novelist Anne Perry, appeared on New Zealand television offering explanations for the murder. The film, a tribute to producer the late Jim Booth, marked a turning point for Peter Jackson, taking him beyond splatter into serious drama. Reviewers locally and overseas raved 'a triumph', 'a remarkable achievement', 'a suspenseful, thrilling film'. HM

_________

1994 Venice Film Festival: Silver Lion. Toronto International Film Festival: Metro Media Award. Academy award nomination: Best Original Screenplay. U.S Writer's Guild Nomination: Best Original Screenplay.

1995 Italy, Fantasia Film Festival: Best Film. France, Fantasia Film Festival: Grand Prize.

New Zealand Film and Television Awards: Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Actress, Melanie Lynskey. Best Supporting Actress, Sarah Peirse. Best Foreign Performer, Kate Winslet. Best Soundtrack. Best Film Score. Best Design. Best Contribution to Design.

Australian Film Critic's Circle: Best Foreign language film (Shared with One Were Warriors).

1996 London Critic's Circle: Best British Actor of the Year (Kate Winslet). Empire Magazine: Best actress (Kate Winslet).