A morbid collision of fantasy and reality
"There is always a certain madness in love. But also there is always a certain method in madness." - Nietzsche, "Of Reading and Writing", Thus Spoke Zarathustra
WITH Bad Taste and Braindead having confirmed director Peter Jackson as a master of the grotesque, Heavenly Creatures (1994) gave his trademark surrealism a historical grounding. Based on the story of two teenage girls in 1950s New Zealand, whose friendship had tragic consequences, Heavenly Creatures marked the film debuts of Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey, and brought Jackson to the attention of a mainstream audience. Far, though, from propagating some lewd apologism of his own for a uniquely callous angst, Jackson instead drew upon a morbidly vivid contemporary source for his inspiration - the schoolgirl journal that itself described the imaginary kingdom Heavenly Creatures brought to the screen. Though a singularly degraded chronicle of otherworldly barbarism, the document fuelled the visual impact of the film, a creativity both exhilarating and unsettling. Nor does Jackson permit aesthetic virtuosity to downplay his implicit condemnation of an act that left an indelible impression on an outwardly sedate community. Critically acclaimed, the film would garner the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the Toronto Festival's Metro Media Award, and an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, one Jackson wrote collaboratively with wife Frances Walsh.
The murder of 45-year-old Honora Mary Parker in Victoria Park, Christchurch, on June 22nd, 1954, generated a controversy that has never fully abated. Multiple injuries were reported by the coroner, Honora having been struck with a half-brick concealed in a stocking. The two figures responsible for the crime - 16-year-old Pauline Yvonne Parker, Honora's daughter, and her closest friend, 15-year-old Juliet Marion Hulme - were jailed for five years, released on the condition that they would never meet again. Inasmuch as the City's conservative Press arguably founded much of its reporting on supposition rather than fact, Jackson chose to chronicle the girls' friendship that led up to the murder, rather than their trial and detention. Accordingly, Jackson, infamous for the macabre originality of his earlier projects, would now cautiously proportion his new work to the ferocity of an existing account. Allied to Jackson's directorial realisation of that world were the lead performances by two little-known names - from Britain, Kate Winslet, and, from New Zealand, Melanie Lynskey. Their curiously seductive portrayal of the warped protagonists was a revelation, fusing independence and burgeoning intensity in a manner as compelling as it was perverse. The film's script is annotated by Pauline's (Lynskey) diary entries.
Initial moments of scene-setting, a 1950s newsreel of Christchurch, illustrating the visitor attractions of an enchanted suburbia, cut to shots of a blood-spattered Pauline and Juliet (Winslet) running through woodland, shouting hysterically "It's Mummy! She's terribly hurt!" and "Please, help us!" as they reach a kiosk run by Agnes Ritchie (Toni Jones). Such is the tone of the ensuing narrative - the abject schism between an innocuous and a darker reality, propriety and expectation grimly impeded by human nature.
With the action then moving to Christchurch Girls' High School, 1952, and the accompaniment of the school assembly singing "Just a Closer Walk with Thee", we move to Miss Waller's (Elizabeth Moody) French class. The door opens and Miss Stewart (Darien Takle) introduces the newly-arrived Juliet Hulme. Miss Waller invites Juliet to take a seat and to create a French name for herself, according to the tradition of that setting. Barely has she sat down than Juliet points out to Miss Waller that "Je doute qu'il vienne is in fact the spoken subjunctive". Miss Waller is as much taken aback at being corrected as by Juliet's 'name', "Antoinette". Their animated exchange is the first stirring of Juliet's playfully subversive humour. Pauline, seated across the room, is plainly taken with Juliet's carefully-honed challenge to the school's conformist regime.
Juliet's mollification of pain is apparent in her early interactions with Pauline. It emerges that both were sickly children - Juliet spent part of the War afflicted with respiratory illness, while Pauline was also hospitalised, with Osteomyelitis that "....turns your bones to chalk". Juliet enthusiastically asks to see Pauline's scar again, before proudly declaring "All the best people have bad chests and bone diseases. It's all frightfully romantic!". Juliet revels in the mitigation of life's horrors, and, whatever reticence Pauline may feel over such jesting, her arrival at the Hulme residence, Ilam, confirms both her acceptance into Juliet's world and the latter's affluence. Pauline, cycling up the drive, stops suddenly upon reaching the house. The property is as much an announcement as a view, with Juliet acknowledging her from a bridge in the garden. "Oh, hi Paul!" she calls out, resembling a princess, in a magnificent costume, Pauline utterly captivated by the scene. She sees a life markedly different to her own, characterised by liberal aspirations and a social aesthetic that translates the seemingly mythical into reality. Her friend stands, goddess-like, but conveys a geniality that renders Pauline equal rather than subservient.
The montage that follows charts their burgeoning friendship, to the sound of The Donkey Serenade, performed by Mario Lanza, for whom Pauline has inherited a love from Juliet. We see Pauline freed from an anonymous existence at the school and entering into both Juliet's carefree mindset and her family's circle. Pauline studiously observes Mrs Hulme's (Diana Kent) mannerisms at dinner, a formerly shy youngster tutoring herself in the etiquette that seemingly grounds and defines the "lives of others".
Soon, we find Pauline visiting Juliet's house a second time, with the two seated in a candlelit corner of the garden. They cut photographs of James Mason and other film actors from magazines. The spot resembles a shrine, covered with images of the girls' icons. Pauline notes that Mason would be "perfect as Jesus", with Juliet saying she will go not to Heaven but to the "Fourth World". It will be similar to Heaven, she says, "....only better, because there aren't any Christians". Pauline has already seen the reality of Juliet's life - now, she has described a realm of her own invention, portrayed with a quietly anarchic fusion of the secular and the theological. Christians may be excluded from her unorthodox noumena, but the "Saints" will be Mason and Lanza. Elaborating, Juliet calls it "....an absolute Paradise of music, art and pure enjoyment". Her appropriation of a solely hedonistic metaphysics may resemble an attractive ideal, but the cost of her surrogate existence to their mutual reason will soon become horrifically clear.
Juliet meets Pauline's parents, Honora Parker (Sarah Peirse) and Herbert Rieper (Simon O'Connor), for lunch one day in early 1953. "It's so nice to meet you", says Juliet, extending her hand to Pauline's mother. Honora seems almost stifled by the gesture, suggesting not so much her ambivalence in the face of courtesy per se, but certainly her mild inferiority upon witnessing in her young guest such abundant social confidence. During the meal, Juliet describes almost ecstatically how "....Charles, in a blazing fury, runs Lancelot through with his sword, leaving Deborah free to accept Charles' proposal of marriage". Herbert and Honora exchange faintly knowing glances, mutually surprised at Juliet's boundless enthusiasm for quasi-Arthurian tales, and wondering, perhaps, if her vivid imagination and implied estrangement from the everyday is par for the course. The scene partly originates the girls' shared development, in their diaries, of Borovnia, perhaps the land already dubbed the "the Fourth World".
Though the girls' emotional affinity is now confirmed, distinctions between them remain prevalent. Part-way through lunch, Honora shows a border the house, Pauline clearly embarrassed at their implicit need to supplement a purportedly meagre income. Herbert tells Juliet he works at a fish suppliers', with Pauline admitting, almost in exasperation, "he's the manager". One wonders if, for Pauline, an innate attraction of Borovnia is her immersion in a "place" that makes no demands on her true circumstances, one that allows her to create as she pleases, identifying her as a worthy partner in the cultivation of Juliet's beguiling literary invention. Pauline has no need to quantify or explain her situation in a world the content and nature of which she is the joint arbiter.
The evolution of their fantasy world is absolute, consuming and disturbing by turns. Pauline and Juliet are indistinguishable from the character names they assign themselves ("Gina" for Pauline, "Deborah" for Juliet), writing letters to one another while Juliet convalesces from a bout of tuberculosis. Actuality is apparently without meaning in Borovnia, so cocooned are the girls in penning the narratives that bring it to life. Fortresses, unicorns and serene land and seascapes are the aesthetics of this ethereal setting, "Diello" and other characters addressing them by their assumed names. Only too clearly is Borovnia a meritocracy - "Gina's" diary entry for June 7th, 1953 reads "My dearest darling Deborah, Affairs of State continue to occupy my time. I have to report that the lower classes are terrifically dull. Only yesterday, I was compelled to execute several peasants, just to alleviate the boredom". Borovnia is a rhetorical serfdom, validating the mystical language through which "Gina" celebrates the "....miracle that two such heavenly creatures are real". Her assertion that "the outstanding genius of this pair is understood by few" is one of a number of statements illustrating the girls' view of themselves, baseless proclamations that centralise them within a seemingly delusional hierarchy. Pauline, writing from "31 Gloucester Street, Borovnia" merges the real and the hypothetical, tallying with the dual identity she openly adopts for herself. In the eyes of Pauline and Juliet's pseudo-morality, social norms and conventional values are laughable anachronisms, the canonical or universal relegated in favour of Borovnia's chivalric emblems and coarse romanticism.
Upon seeing Juliet and Pauline lying on a bed together at Ilam, Juliet's father, Dr Henry Hulme (Clive Merrison), voices his concerns to Herbert and Honora. Conjecturing that Pauline may be "...developing in a rather - wayward - fashion", he recommends the professional opinion of Dr Bennett (Gilbert Goldie), a physician with some expertise in Child Psychology. "Wayward" is almost certainly Dr Hulme's tacit synonym for "homosexual", the possibility of which is explored in a notably trying exchange between Pauline and Bennett. Dr Bennett suggests Pauline "might like to think about spending more time with boys", Diello suddenly appearing to slice through Bennett with a sword, the camera pulling back to reveal Pauline's triumphant expression upon "witnessing" the dispatch of one who stands in the way of her friendship with Juliet. Imaginary beings do the girls' savage bidding, "executing" all who do not merit inclusion in Borovnia. Fiction now dictates the real, those around Pauline and Juliet fit for life - or only for death - in their gruesomely-maintained elite.
Dr Hulme's plan to leave for England, pending divorce after his wife's affair with a client at the Marriage Guidance Council, and for Juliet to move to South Africa, effectively spells the beginning of the end for her association with Pauline. Despite Herbert and Honora's protestations to the contrary, Mrs Hulme suggests allowing Pauline and Juliet to spend the two weeks before Juliet's departure together. Pauline walks into the hallway at Ilam. Juliet, wearing a ballroom dress, comes down the stairs to greet her. Immediately, the two descend into their fantasy world, dancing to the sound of Mario Lanza singing The Loveliest Night of the Year. The transition from reality to fantasy is seamless, Pauline and Juliet's occupation of both realms adamantly without distinction.
Honora expressly forbids Pauline to join Juliet in South Africa, saying "You're a child. You're fourteen. You belong here, with us". Her mother's defiance of her plans is the lynchpin of the crime, Pauline giving her a look of piercing contempt, with the narration "Suddenly, the means of ridding myself of this obstacle occurred to me. If she were to die....". Pauline sees her mother as little more than an object, an inhibition to her Borovnian existence. A further diary entry, making clear the murder plan, reads "Naturally, we feel a trifle nervous, but the pleasure of anticipation is great. Peculiarly enough, I have no qualms of conscience". Pauline visualises specific actions without assigning them any moral profile or foreseen consequences. Her malevolence is as coolly-engineered as her Borovnian fantasy, those "events" explicitly illustrated but with no ethical framework descriptively intuiting their horror. If Borovnia is without codes of right and wrong, Honora's impending fate is duly sanctioned. Juliet, too, is convinced they have set themselves on a legitimate course - "I think she knows what's going to happen. She doesn't appear to bear us any grudge. Your mother is rather a miserable woman, isn't she", idealising her would-be victim's complicity, with Honora's supposedly colourless personality "validating" their sadism.
The sustained tension of the film's climactic scene is as magnetic as it is chilling. After stopping at a tearoom, a little after 3.00 on the afternoon of June 22nd, Pauline, Juliet and Honora make their way along the tranquil wooded paths of Victoria Park. The benign mood of Puccini's 'Humming Chorus' wilfully sets elegy against anticipation, the choral beauty of the score almost tempting us away from the imminent brutality. The hypnotic quality of the sublime momentarily placates our terrible knowledge. We are certain of an appalling act, but must endure its cold realisation.
Mario Lanza's rendition of You'll Never Walk Alone, at the film's close, laments with conscious irony the end of Pauline and Juliet's friendship without condoning their actions. Their union, underpinned though it was with buoyant imagination and spellbinding tableaux, cannot detract from their evil, Jackson cautious to stress their depravity over the film's visual audacity. Perhaps the standout performances come from Melanie Lynskey and Sarah Peirse, bringing to the screen immaculate portrayals of adolescent rebellion and parental concern. The visual effects, from Weta Digital, are extraordinary, evoking a unique literary and alternative dramatic space.
Harrowing and moving, Heavenly Creatures is an infectious tour de force of New Zealand cinema, deftly balancing shock and taste.
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